How exactly do they "stop" it? Remember that in the USA, private sector sanctions on Israel for the policies of its democratically elected people are deeply controversial and sometimes even illegal (BDS), even though there's an obvious way Israelis could stop those actions.

There's a lot of naivety being bandied about in the last week. Everyone seems to agree Putin isn't really democratically elected (though are vague on the details of how he rigs this, beyond controlling TV channels), at the same time, somehow he's a dictator only because ordinary Russians just can't be bothered getting rid of him. This is a contradiction. Dictators stay in power even if almost everyone in a country wants to get rid of them because they have set things up that way. This is why sanctions never seem to work.