I think the overall idea here is to piss off ordinary Russians enough to incentivize grassroots change.
The young folks in Russia are using TikTok et al to find out what's really going on. These are the ones who will most be hurt. Those seeking the truth.
We need those folks to have information so they can push back.
This is why the BBC has a Tor service. [1]
I think the Roskomnadzor watchdog has pretty much preemptively done that already though no? And it's not just social media but things like the BBC and Deutsche Welle etc. See:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-complet...
and
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-rferl-bbc-facebook-google-twi...
If someone is going to disconnect Russia from Internet it is going to be Russian themselves, to limit the free flow of information that might be conflicting with the official truth.
But like with the Chinese firewall, information find its way. Unless Russia wants to set itself back to 70s, they still need to access Github, Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront, etc. For the Russian IT business to work. It is going to be very inefficient to run anything with a pen and a paper.
Software development and Internet were built on scientific principles, criticism, criticial thinking. This requires free flow of information. You cannot have one without the other, or you are going to end up with very inferior and inefficient software ecosystem.
LOL. Do you really think the brass even know what it is?
Putin doesn't even know how the modern mobile phones look, he didn't needed one for more than 20 years.
To give you a slight idea how long it is - the famous Nokia 3310 was announced 9 months later than his (acting) presidency.
They can't. And they won't. Nice in theory but it's 2022 and here we are. Nobody is pushing back at all, in any meaningful way over there.
Some Russian citizens were saying they don't support the war and have nothing to do with it. These sanctions make it personal for them in a non-violent, non-lethal way.
We are trading Russians' convenience for Ukrainians' lives and, judging by Putin's tone today, it is working.
You will have to decide how to interpret it and whether he really believes it. It's not exactly a "let's de-escalate together" statement, but it certainly suggests sanctions are working.
"But mom, they got to do crime, why can't I do crime?"
The Russian government acknowledged that hundreds of soldiers died, publicly. That’s not a tiny mission.
Is this even an "illegal" war? I mean, other than by the standard of "every war is an illegal war"? Not taking sides (I don't know enough about the history and politics to do so), but I know Ukraine was part of Russia until very recently. If, somehow, Mexico had the means to do so and were to try to "take back" Texas... I can't help but wonder if the international response would be a lot more neutral than the response to Russia trying to "take back" Ukraine.
And if ISPs stop providing service, how will protestors organize anyway? By laying cable in the ground themselves?
If you were to rank who is to blame for the sanctions why is the West in the top position? Why not the party responsible? If you tug on the thread of "why is this happening?" one thing seems clear: for no reason worth the discomfort.
People keep saying this, but it’s not even close to accurate. The Shah, Marcos, Ceaușescu, and Mubarak come to mind.
And, I vaguely remember something in the USSR in ‘91.
I'm sure the oligarchs are pissed at yacht seizures and banking discomfort too but so what? This is a valid tactic since they didn't attack a NATO member.
If they did, then they would be facing the same things that Ukrainian citizens are.
Russia flexes their might against their own citizens constantly and disrupts their quality of life. There's always going to be some that will be emboldened for the wrong reasons. But it doesn't make sense for nations to sit idly by.
The idea that citizens over there could organize with internet and actually accomplish any change is nonsense.
In retrospect we should have ground the Russian military to dust after ‘91. No aid without nuclear disarmament and population reeducation.
Hopefully when the dust settles this time, we don’t make the same mistakes.
As long as Putin can re-interpret this as an external aggression from the $insert_pejorative West, and broadcast that better than Twitter, CNN, etc, I can see those sanctions having an opposite effect and further solidify his power.
On the other hand, I can see attacking those who are closer to him being a lot more effective. His billionaire friends not being able to travel to south of France for vacation is a much more serious threat than a regular person who cannot use Apple Pay or watch Netflix any longer.
There's an ethical argument against it: "hey lets punish innocent civilians so they attack the real enemy" and a practical argument: "hey russia started the conflict, but didnt cut-off your internet, that was a US company that sees you as their enemy"
The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
stop doing war.
That’s kinda how war works. I think a lot of the folks criticizing you are in a position of privilege, or have an interesting perspective on what open warfare really means.
Apply pressure to the country until you get the results you want. I can appreciate the focus on Putin and his cronies, but no one gets out untouched.
Also realize that statistically speaking you likely didn't dissent when we invaded Iraq. We were propagandized and consent was manufactured via the NYT and others. If your family was driven into poverty as a result, I don't believe you would have welcomed it whatsoever.
That's not how war works.
Have you considered that these actions might provoke and prolong greater conflict?
Uh, you mean like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria? I don't think whataboutism is a good argument for sanctions here. Sanctions are a balancing act between inconveniencing the regime and inconveniencing their people. There's a calculus to consider. You're acting as if this is a new tenet of international diplomacy or something.
He is just criticizing people who criticize sanctions. From his perspective, the cost of sanctions is trivial compared to the cost of war.
No whataboutism here.
"Man, you people who when babies are being exploded and apartment buildings attacked with missiles, an entire nation being invaded, who ask these questions about inconveniencing citizens of the attacking nation, are you even real? The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
stop doing war."
To whom?
I dont understand the point of conflating a nation and its citizens here. There are Russians that live in the US, and americans that live in Russia. There are warmongers in all countries, as pacifists in all countries.
> The next time the USA invades someone I welcome for you to destroy my financial life and drive my family and I into subsistence farming if it helps to stop us. You have my permissions.
Can we put this into a contract? I'm more than willing to be the recipient of your funds if this came to pass.
Also consider that sanctions as a result of the Crimea annexation haven't done anything. We're still here, today, 8 years later, and Putin is waging war again. The funny thing is that when I was looking for something about this, I found an article[0] that is generally positive about the effects of sanctions on Russia post-Crimea. Which I find kinda hilarious, because I think it really proves the point here that these sanctions don't actually work. The Russian economy slowed quite a bit, but it seems clear Putin and the oligarchs don't care all that much; the harm from those sanctions were disproportionately borne by regular Russian citizens, who were powerless to change the country's foreign policy. And, regardless, Russia is still in control of Crimea, and has not deterred Putin from this current war, so... that's a pretty big hint the sanctions did not do what they were supposed to.
[0] https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2015/07/13/sanctio...
Of course Russia is a different situation, and there are already plenty of Russian citizens there protesting the war, but I find it a little hard to believe that peaceful protest works all that well in what is effectively a dictatorship. (Hell, consider how ineffective -- or at best, excruciatingly slow-acting -- anti-war protests have been in even the US since WWII.)
I expect the only thing that could get Putin to stop would be his oligarch cronies getting financially destroyed to the point that they can't take it anymore. But it seems like they've been preparing for this for a while, and might not be hurt by sanctions as much as we'd expect. Regardless, if we assume that the oligarchs and government officials are the right people to target, broad-based measures that hurt regular Russians are just cruel and probably not that effective.
Look at Iran now: a pariah state whose power has been effectively contained, limited in its ability to fund a substantial warchest or buy modern weapons & technology. It's currently working with the US on a new nuclear deal to ameliorate its heavy sanctions.
Russia can look forward to a similar future. Military invasions cost a lot of resources, the current invasion is largely funded by European gas sales and a variety of foreign trade. Aside from weapons & tech, military morale is an important factor in combat effectiveness, but it's also affected by resource availability. A less resourced military is a less capable one.
We're beyond just deterrence now. Russian citizens can blame everyone except Putin, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that when Putin's military lackeys draw up plans, when they threaten others, they do so with a fraction of the tech and resources they are used to. Let's see them bully a 21st century world with a 20th century economy.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, I wouldn't be surprised seeing Putin going fully fascist to hold together a Russia that's disintegrating.