Instead comments seem to focus on how Russians deserve punishment, but how productive is this type of punishment? I would think it's an important goal to turn the Russians against Putin.
see https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501676859741904898 for details
maybe (maybe) putin reality distortion field can keep working, or maybe russian will start to wonder why everybody is leaving russia all of a sudden (including many russians).
The west is not isolating them, just they are self isolating. All independent media had to shut down there.
Western services are also cutting them off. I get the sense that's helping Putin.
An example:
> Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
Maybe a DNS service is not the best example, but I feel like it's not the only service that I've seen do this.
EDIT: Better example:
> Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
Even BBC has to restart using AM radio for its russian services (not done since the Cold War).
Stop 'victim playing' and blaming the west, when you should be blaming your leader for the massive censorship going on in Russia right now.
TF? I'm not Russian.
I put a better example.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-moscows-claims-of-bio...
Lumen and Cogent already stopped peering with Russian ISPs. It's not Russian government, and they are doing the dirty work for the Russian government.
This is not about punishment or providing services, this is about peering and basic connectivity at the backbone level. It can break the Internet as the common medium, and not just for Russia. This sets the precedent that undermines decades of development and can make the biggest contribution to peace in the history of humanity fall apart into different bubbles.
Very powerful message and on point, it's no wonder every dictator shuts the net down when things start to turn/burn internally.
This environment of elevated risk is ample reason for any international business to avoid business with Russian nationals, other Russian entities, and anything to do with Russia, generally, at this time. It is unfortunate that Russian citizens may see less of the outside world as a consequence of these high level sanctions and of this politically risky situation. It is not the responsibility of these operators to remedy that.
That's a terrible decision for every Russian who wants to have a chance to find different information's.
That's angry, polarized people giving into being cruel. It's understandable. I thought I was jaded, but the horrors coming out of Ukraine are breathtaking. But the Russian people deserve none of this, nor what is coming for them.
There are two sanctions/decoupling strategies: a fast strategy and a slow strategy.
The fast strategy aims to convince elites to change course. If Putin withdraws, he gets his economy back. That's unlikely here; the real targets are his generals. The slow strategy is about degrading capability. It's a worst-case fallback for when the fast strategy fails. Smaller economies power smaller war machines. Brain drain, industrial decay and material shortages make unmanageable threats less potent.
Drawn-out sanctions undermine the appeal of popular uprising. External pressure tends to bring people together, which in this case means tolerating eroding freedoms in exchange for security. And starving, broken people don't revolt. When we deploy long-term sanctions, we're putting a nation in international quarantine. Despite the terrific cost, to ourselves and the innocent people there. The image of decades-long sanctions forcing people into the streets against their own government is a fantasy based on the fast-strategy success of the South African example.
The purpose of the sanctions is to reduce support for Putin from the people he actually needs to support his regime (russian billionaires, the government, the army, etc), and to cripple its ability to support its army.
An example:
> Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
EDIT: Better example:
> Internet backbone provider shuts off service in Russia
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/5/22962822/internet-backbone...
While I generally agree that the West should not be shutting down the information pipes, in this environment the additional harm of such actions may be minimal.
But West, blocking Visa essentially made it impossible for average Russian IT guy to pay for VPS. And if The Internet would be cut off, the game is over, the entire country will be brain washed by Russian propaganda exclusively. I guess, it should be possible to use UnionPay to buy VPS in Turkey or something like that.
I, personally, don't believe that western propaganda is one bit better that Russian propaganda. It's the same half-truths, half-lies, just picked differently. But what I do believe is that every person must have access to all points of view, without any exclusions. And must be encouraged to learn all points of view for important subjects.
The things is, there is no way to buy a $5 VPS/VPN now in Russia "thanks" to Visa / Mastercard actions.
Let's not help them do their job, then, even a little bit. Some of the recent sanctions/pullouts are probably counterproductive, e.g.:
1. Visa/Mastercard cutting off service. - It seems like a big result of this has been to make it more difficult for Russians to flee the country. If you want to harm the Russian government, one way to do that is through a brain drain, so make that easy.
2. The Cogent disconnection. - If an authoritarian government wants to disconnect, then the correct response is to try to do the opposite.
3. etc. - e.g. the Namecheap thing. Maybe they should have enacted a content policy rather than just cutting off the whole country. Though their response seems forgivably human since they have so many people in Ukraine.
IMHO, cutoffs should only be done strategically or for reasonable tactical reasons (e.g. cybersecurity threats). In some cases if you want to Russia's actions, in some cases the best action is to leave, but in other's it's to stay (or carefully change policy).
I'm doubtful of that. I think an authoritarian government might benefit from a brain drain.
Even if a brain drain were desirable, there's no way the effectiveness of that outweighs the harm to the economy that the cutoff by Visa/Mastercard would have.
My understanding is that the cutoff only affects 1) foreign cards in Russia and 2) Russian cards outside of Russia, because domestic Russian credit card transactions are cleared with a different (domestic) system. So it mainly affects tourists and expats, and probably has minimal impact on the domestic economy.
Wouldn't that also affect online transfers that cross their border? For example, their international purchases and payment of services, and also their receipt of payments from international employers or clients.
Cutoff by Visa and Mastercard has zero impact on local economy. They do not handle local transactions for their branded cards. But indeed, they made life much more difficult for a hundred thousand Russians who are fleeing the country at the moment.
For the vast majority of the information on the internet, Visa/Mastercard is going to be irrelevant to Russians' ability to access alternative perspectives anyway
Historically, making the people hurt through sanction is the most effective way of getting rid of a dictator
.
> I would think it's an important goal to turn the Russians against Putin.
They're paying $150 for days-old individual McDonalds burgers on the web
This is how they get turned against Putin.
I have lived through the entire life of the Internet and seen only the exact opposite things happened that we all expected and hoped would happen with free and open access to information. Conspiracy theories thrived rather than got rebutted, political discourse worsened, it did not improve. The power of large corporations increased, power was not democratized.
Perhaps without Internet young people will be bored and when young men are idle they tend to turn to the kind of violent uprising Russia probably needs.
That seems way too improbable.
The sanctions aren't about punishing Russians, nor about getting Russians to reject Putin.
It's all just virtue signalling. It's literally irrelevant what impact it has, if any.
Russians have had all the ability to watch the videos of Ukraine destruction and to get all the other true information about the war. They wouldn't. All together with Putin they have for 20 years been resurrecting the myth of "Great Russia", which in its current form is pretty much nazism (or like Ukrainians and Baltic countries usually call it "russism" ['rashizm']- short for "Russian Fascism"). Even directly facing the truth Russians refuse to believe it and dismiss it as fakes, propaganda, etc. They like to think of themselves as a "Big Brother liberating the smaller one". That is kind of mental blindness which just can't be pierced by any normal way. They need pain to wake up back to reality.
There is only one way to deal with such a nuclear empire - like with USSR the Russians need to be pushed down to the level when they will lose any respect, fear of and obedience to their government while their government needs to be struck hard to lose economical and as result political power.