Coming from Russia doesn't mean you agree with government policy. If you saw people get arrested as soon as they start protesting, what would you do?
Yandex News is IIRC the biggest news media in Russia.
It filtered all results on protests and opposition resources leaving only government propaganda. Same with war. Filtering not meaning downranking. Just straight up not showing.
Editors were fired for not staying in line until it was completely sterilized and filled with pro-war propaganda.
Working in Yandex is being complicit with it.
In my opinion it is not punishment to stop a relationship if the basis of that relationship was destroyed deliberately by one side.
> punishment: the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offence.
Then you can play all you want with language to make it say what you'd like but it's pointless.
If you still mantain that the purpose is deterrence, then you must be a fool or worse, since it never works! Can't you learn from the past?
Edit:
Before you even dig out some article like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/04/28...
I will make an important point: sanctions CAN work only to prevent something from happening. Once that happened, e.g. the war started, there's no sanction that can stop it and that's exactly when sanctions stop being a deterrent and start being a punishment.
They are pretty effective at preventing future wars. This war happened only because Russia wasn't crippled enough after 2014.
you can't really blame the companies for not wanting to be associated in any way with a nazist regime genociding a neighboring country.
And Starbucks or Mercedes pulling out of Russia isn't punishment. It is freedom of association and economic activity. Russians are whining about "punishment" because they have no idea about freedom, and that is them getting a bit of taste of it. They think they can plaster whole country with their swastika - "Z" - in enthusiastic support of the bloody genocide while the whole word shouldn't be able to express its disgust at those happenings.
Especially funny how Russians are cry-baby style whining about supposed violation of their property rights by the West sanctions while Russians have been violating property rights of more than 40 million of Ukrainians (even if we don't consider all the mass killing and raping of civilians that Russians have been doing there). The deep and profound disintegration of any morals in my old country is stunning.
>or issuing sanctions on private individuals.
due to the size of their wealth and the de-facto rules of economic activity in Russia those aren't private wealth of private individuals - they are integral part of that nazist regime, and thus they are guilty too.
And for the sanctioned Russian government officials - that is for example the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, who is one of the main founders of the Russian Nazi movement "Motherland" (people from which has since taken prominent roles across the Russian government and the ruling Party) and who is one of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's favorite, giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".
Not even seeing the irony. What did they expect in response to bombing, pillaging, mass rape? Friendly hug?
What did they expect? Probably indifference, same reaction to any war crime committed by the west so far.
If it were not for NATO, Russian rapists would already be in Tallinn, Vilnius, Helsinki. Claiming they were offended by historical injustices therefore women should be raped and men shot dead ("denazified").
Not the people in Donbass and Crimea apparently.
> Russian rapists
Oh please, quit the blatant Lyudmila Denisova propaganda. She was fired by your own government for all the falsehood she spread.
Russian soldiers have been shooting civilians at will (it is called "safari" in Russian army, and those Bucha streets - Yablunska and Vokzalnaya - with the bodies lying along the street is an example of such a "safari"). That would be an unique miracle in history if the soldiers wouldn't rape given such power in such conditions (for example those mass rapes by Soviet soldiers - 2 million of women were raped - back then in Germany in 1945 illustrate a result of such a power by the occupying force). And there is no miracle - just google Ukrainian rapes.
https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/06/01/ukrainian-official-fir...
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/04/18/i-can-do-whatever-i-...
I'm not suggesting there have been no rapes or that Russians are the good guys. Just that the reports of mass rapes were fabricated (Denisova admitted she thought it would help Ukraine obtain more sympathy and weapons from the west).
Because most of those "everyone's" are not facing the choices themselves and are basically keyboard warriors. Let's see what they say when they'll be asked to sacrifice their own well being to be on a "high moral ground".
As a relatively neutral party in all of this whose country hasn't tainted itself (but who nevertheless spent all my live under a similar autocracy), I can't help but shake my head at keyboard revolutionaries who definitely would have overthrown the regime, if only they lived in Russia. You just have no freaking idea what you're talking about. Guard your democracy as best you can so you don't have to find out.
If you look at Snowden and Assange, that ship has sailed.
No, I think that's very naive.
Yes. HTH!
To elaborate: At some stage, that becomes the only acceptable alternative; not doing so is morally culpable.
The world learned that in 1945, two ways:
1) "I was only following orders" was deemed not a valid excuse at the Nürnberg trials; not refusing orders like that is complicity; and
2) Germany as a whole was de-Nazified. Just like Russia needs to be now. (But more thoroughly: in Germany's case, it was an aberration of a dozen years; in Russia's, it's a millennium of unbroken history of totalitarianism.)
Too bad the world seems to have forgotten those lessons since then.
Russian police is notorious for selling logs, private data or access and also selling databases on a black market.
Why are you so surprised? This is exactly how most of the population behaves everywhere. People go about their business and "support" criminal actions of their governments all the time. This includes the West. Our governments have no problems exterminating, starving and displacing people (as long as they're the "right" people to mess with) while the majority of the population is going on merrily about their business. And Europe keeps buying Russian stuff even now while "Ukrainians are being killed". Where are the mass protests and fights with the police?
Things might change when "messing" with people will ALWAYS have the consequences for ANY country. But this is not what is happening and is unlikely to change. We have no extra terrestrial entity to police us in impartial way.
It's high time to bring "but US bombed Iraq". Classic playbook.
No one likes hypocrisy, especially when it is coming from the same westerners that at most protested for a few weeks back in 2003 when their own countries bombed us for 2 decades, that are now calling for other people to get arrested and possibly tortured/executed by putin's regime because that's just the right thing(tm) to do to stop the war. It would be laughable if it wasn't despicable.
"Yes hundreds of thousands of Muslims died and are still dying, but bringing it up or asking me to do anything about is fallacious! Checkmate"
As you said, who cares about debate tricks when people in the middle east are still dying from the war on terror as we spead? Why are you holding other people to standards that you don't even pretend to hold yourself to? You are expecting people to get arrested to prevent deaths and talk about the situation in ukraine, but I guess making you uncomfortable with "whataboutism" is the limit?
Probably move if that's anywhere near a possibility, and if not, cowardly stay as unnoticeable as possible. I know that at least in Finland Russian refugees are mostly welcome (although the border might be closed right now), even if they probably will face a lot of scrutiny from various authorities for obvious reasons. Most certainly it's nothing like the attention such people would face in Russia.
We fondly remember even the smallest acts of defiance that ordinary Germans acted out against their regime during 1933-1945. We all would like to be those people in times of crisis, but obviously most of us are not. They were probably ultimately pretty futile acts during that time, though, but put together with all the other actions that happened against the Nazis played a significant grander role. And we know that more than a few significant Jewish scientists and engineers fled from Nazi Germany and made significant contributions to the war effort. For instance, one guy called Einstein.
What should russians do you ask? Fight. I did it in Ukraine in 2004. Then in 2014. I didn't run from cops, I didn't let them take my friends. But regardless, now we pay with our lives, being subjected to genocide because of russian cowardliness.
because so far they are all just paying for the genocide.
Russian IT and media were showered with relatively high wages to stay quiet while last semblance of elections was finally destroyed, independent media was took over by pro-Putin oligarchs and activists were crushed or murdered.
As was the sarcastic saying coined recently, "if you are apolitical then bullets don't hit you".