Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think it is a very important point.

I perfectly well understand (and share) the anger against Russia, and desire to use sanctions and withdrawal of companies/services as a tool to reduce the quality of life in Russia and through that (hopefully) affect the policies of the Russian state/change the government. One can argue whether they will be effective, but it is a tool that is used as an alternative to pure war, and so I'd argue it is better.

But in the same time, I certainly recommend for every company to think a little bit whether their withdrawal is going to make the regime life easier or harder. I would think that withdrawal of Cogent was counterproductive. Similarly I think the stopping of Mastercard/Visa (effective immediately) mostly hurt people who just recently left russia under the threat to their lives (like independent journalists).

All that said, it's hard to ask companies to make a careful analysis about the consequences of their actions on Russian regime as that's not their job. So for sure there will be unintended consequences like hurting some people who were fighting the regime, and consequences helping Russia. I just hope the companies will try to minimise those and think a little before following the current pressure to disassociate from Russia.

Sanctions are to stop the flow of money to the war machine that is currently indiscriminately killing civilians.

What goes beyond the sanctions, like business withdrawals from Russia (Visa, MasterCard, Microsoft, McDonalds) is a business decision to mitigate a geopolitical risk. The management board does not want to be ”stained in blood” and is willing to give up on Russia than in any way be associated with Russian war propaganda. Furthermore it is likely that the current shareholders are going to lose the Russian business any case, due to nationalisation, credit defaults, oligarchs taking over, local mob bosses taking over, etc. Russia is a country run by thugs, the only law is Putin’s word and when thugs see an opportunity they will use it.

Broad sanctions have more purposes than the 2 primary ones (limit funds available for war and make life harder for leaders).

Sanctions of the kind we see now will, not only as an unfortunate side effect, for example

- disproportionately cause working age and educated people to leave the country causing brain drain and furthering the demographic crisis

- lowering the risk/reward threshold for ordinary people to protest the regime. People with somewhat comfortable lives might not risk prison to protest the war. People who can’t eat or who lost their life savings in a year might.

I agree that when consumer brands boycott Russia it’s likely mostly optics and fear of consumer boycott. Not much can be done about that. It just happens to align with and further the sanctions.

It’s important that Russians are given international news, however. Cutting communications seems counter productive.

I agree, and I support most of the sanctions and business withdrawals, especially when there is personnel and tax payed in Russia, but again as an example, if you are Russian opposition, you don't want to be hosted in Russia, as the hoster will take you down on government request, so you have to be hosted abroad. And now if the west just decides to terminate every contract from a Russian citizen, I'd say that'll hurt more the enemies of the government than not. But it's just my opinion, and you can't expect every business to make that kind of analysis.

The free flow of information is a tough question. The Russian opposition is literally killed in this point, and only opposition that can operate has left/is leaving Russian. The only free flow of information for Average Ivan is using Telegram in this point. People are so soaked in disinformation that they do not believe anything outside Kremlin’s evening news. And it will only get harder, as Putin wants to copy all the latest gadgets from Chinese firewall. I feel Chinese are happy to do some export business here.

It’s intentional to hurt Russian citizens economically. It’s up to them to decide to form a government that doesn’t invade others. Aside from war, this is the only thing the West can do to stop this insane aggression.

Yes, that is okay with me and understandable. It's just if the West says, lets cut off the Internet from Russia, I think that will just help the Russian government, so therefore it's not a good idea in my book.

If it would help them, they would've done it themselves. They've already taken out Twitter and Facebook without any hesitation.

But government can't take off Telegram, for example. Despite they tried multiple times. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia And thanks to Telegram, people in Russia could find non-propaganda sources, even when Russia blocks them.

VPN helps too. A lot of people use it.

While Putin has money from oil and gas, he could sponsor war and destroy protests. Let's take away them, stop or reduce buying oil and gas. Regime becomes weak and Russian people could resist it.

Since Telegram is unmoderated there is all kinds of propaganda on it though. You may not know what to believe is that is your only source.

This won't work because a) many of the current measures mainly hurt the most westernized part of the population (i.e. those most critical of the current regime) and b) this plays perfectly into Putin's narrative that the West hates Russia and the Russian people.

It still works. The people who know Russia is the aggressor know the truth, and eventually people less susceptible to propaganda do regain power.

I am all in for rational decision making, and here is a point to consider.

All the world bullies are carefully watching and figuring out if they could afford their own might makes right exercise. A companie's action or inaction will be noted and taken into account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com