Russia invaded it’s neighbor. These sanctions are one of the consequences.
It sucks for the good-faith programmers in Russia but what would you have the rest of the world do? The Russian state must be sanctioned for its blatant disregard for international norms.
Please don’t just respond with whataboutism. The whataboutism in these threads involves different people in different times. This is happening now.
The problem with this discourse is that what you said is hardly relevant. We have a clear understanding of what is considered moral and ethical behavior and what's not. The subject matter may as well be discrimination as no valid legal reason was given for action taken against a group of people otherwise. To say that a group of people is valid to discriminate against because reasons is also discriminatory in itself. If one wants to claim moral superiority, they have to abide by what is moral, otherwise that would make them a hypocrite. To discriminate against someone who did nothing wrong for you, and in fact was working for your cause, and to do that due to the fact that you can do nothing else for a good cause is both hypocritical and petty.
> The subject matter may as well be discrimination as no valid legal reason was given for action taken against a group of people otherwise.
All decisions are discrimination, and discrimination in general is fine. There are narrow, specific kinds of discrimination that are suspect and need additional justification. OTOH, a perfectly valid reason was offered: legal advice based on international sanctions imposed on Russian entities in response to Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Now, certainly, there was not public information sufficient to assess the correctness of that decision, and I would not prejudge any claim from any party adversely impacted that chose to challenge it.
But I’d also note that where there is not a contractual relationship or some other binding commitment to way against the potential consequences of sanctions violations, legal advice will likely be “better safe than sorry” in that it is better to cut off relations where there is no commitment more broadly than sanctions might require rather than to err on the other side, too. Acting in such advice mag still be a reasonable and prudent decision.
The legal reasons is the sanctions against Russia for their illegal war of aggression. All of Russia and all who live within its borders are responsible for these actions.
There is something beautiful about how U.S. news outlets were always going on about how Russia is a dictatorship, with rigged elections, where you'll be beaten, arrested or killed for protesting or speaking out--Russians supposedly have no agency. And yet simultaneously, now, Russians apparently must be held accountable for everything their government ever does, because they "voted him in" or "should overthrow Putin".
We can't have it both ways. Either Russia is a functioning democracy (which I don't personally believe exists anywhere but that is another topic), or perhaps the average person does not actually have very much say in such events.
Sanctions are meant to harm innocent people as much as possible, on purpose, with the idea being that it will cause so much unrest that the government either caves to the pressure or the people revolt. While I find that very sick in and of itself, I would at least appreciate it if we were honest about that rather than making contradictory moral statements.
That said, worse yet, almost hilariously, I cannot think of a single time sanctions have ever truly worked in a situation even remotely similar to that of Russia. Just think about countries like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, etc -- like it or not, these countries have not toppled as a result of the sanctions. Do they hurt? Yes, of course, but they evidently do not destroy nations the way we believed they would.
Instead, the innocent are hurt, as was the intention, yet the goal never gets achieved. North Korea still has nuclear weapons, and all we've done is force Iran to develop its own industry, such that, ironically, it is now capable of sending weapons to aid Russia.
They have had a century to institute actual democracy. If 70% supported deposing Putin instead of the war it would be difficult for him to retain power or he would have to change tack to retain control and keep his skin intact.
We didn't think of the poor Germans when we burned them alive as part of the effort to stop the Nazis and few argue that the Germans aren't collectively complicit save only for those who actively resisted.
I'm fully willing to hold blameless those who burned weapons and recruitment centers, spoke out publicly against the war within or after fleeing Russia, shot their commander, or surrendered to avoid an unjust fight.
I'm aware those are all extremely risky. I know exactly why someone would want to keep their heads down and I none the less blame them no less than I blame all the good Nazis who didn't believe in the ideology but kept their heads down while Jews burned in ovens and their neighbors rotted in battlefields and economic consequences are the least of what is just and fair.
A million people are dead including many of their own they are complicit.
People who will suffer economically under sanctions or in this case from exclusion but who if the war isn't stopped may suffer explosive dismemberment or see their kids come home in a box.
You can't invoke "international norms" and then in the very next paragraph "but no talking about precedent, that would be whataboutism".
Norms are established through precedents. There are considerable precedents in the 21st century that military invasions DO NOT lead to international sanctions. So this isn't a valid argument, and it's true that that decision was emotional and politically motivated.
It’s a perfectly valid argument. All invasions are generally bad, some worse than others. And, yes, some perpetrators of unjust invasions are punished worse than others.
The idea that you turn a conversation about fairness for victims into a conversation about fairness for bullies means you don’t actually care about victims.
If you want perfect fairness for bullies, not victims, then you don’t actually care about victims at all.
This whataboutism is a circular argument where any brazen invasion can be justified by some previous perceived slight. Because someone somewhere got away with something, now anything is permissible.
There has never been an "unprovoked aggression against Yugoslavia". More than 130K people were killed and 4 million displaced (mainly by Serb troops) and people begged for an intervention, which came to late (think about Sarajevo, Srebrenica).
What they actually see is a despondent and divided West with no stomach for a fight, ripe to gleefully exploit open values and norms for their own gain.
It's clear from the last decade or so that there is much to gain from portraying oneself as a victim, to appeal to supposed liberal values, all to mask what is really a commitment to naked Realism and
Tribalism, the true principle that consistently binds the "global south" together. They do not care for colonialism, oppression or "bullying", it's only wrong that it should happen to them. Otherwise they're quite glad to brutally suppress their own internal separatist movements or opposition. That is what the "average" person thinks.
You can convince a few useful idiots in universities to act against their own interests, but people elsewhere aren't stupid to see what one's intentions really are.
Don't you think there's a chance that that narrative of "murderous autocrats" was manufactured post hoc to rationalize NATO's aggression?
Otherwise it's a mighty coincidence that the West only "intervenes" in places that are simultaneously relevant to Western geopolitical-economic interests and just happen to have a "murderous autocrat" begging to be toppled.
So convenient that the bloc which dominates the global media landscape is always narratively-justified in its murder campaigns. Nothing fishy there!
> they see a complicated proxy war where the bigger bully is forcing an institutionally-weak nation to degrade or destroy an enemy state
This is so, so ridiculous take of the war that I refuse to believe there are any significant number of people outside of Russia believing this. NATO/US is forcing Russia to destroy Ukraine, really now? They really are forced to wage an expansionist, genocidal war against a small neighbour?
This is arguing that we have not sanctioned murderous evil actions in the past therefore we must not do so now or ever after. It's a pretty bad argument.
When the word "whataboutism" is used, you know it's the one rejection of a valid argument or analogy that helps clarify the argument. The ones that can't deal with that coined the therm "whataboutism".
Israel has invaded its neighbour. U.S. invaded lots of nations and still bombs multiple nations continually. But no consequences for the same. Whataboutism is necessary since the NATO/Western block juggernaut always raps others on the knuckles but always gets away scot-free when it concerns their own military actions. The sanctimonious hypocrisy is utterly sickening to those in the East and South.
It sucks for the good-faith programmers in Russia but what would you have the rest of the world do? The Russian state must be sanctioned for its blatant disregard for international norms.
Please don’t just respond with whataboutism. The whataboutism in these threads involves different people in different times. This is happening now.