Such a ban is pointless unless you block every business which does business with Russia and that is not possible. Eastern European countries, ex soviet satellites, etc would have to pick sides and that kind of final decision isn't in our best interests or theirs.

If you only block doing business with Russia, then middlemen in other countries will just have to be go-betweens making a politically inflammatory action (blocking a world power) that wasn't actually effective beyond being offensive.

Blocking Crimea is a symbolic but also mostly ineffective practice done to make a statement. Making that statement about the entire country wouldn't be prudent.

Restricting US companies from doing any business with Russia hurts the US economy too much.

Based on my napkin math using 2017 data, Russia makes up 0.45% of US exports, and 0.43% of imports. So I think there must be more to it than:

> Restricting US companies from doing any business with Russia hurts the US economy too much.

sources:

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218255/total-value-of-us...

No it doesn’t. Non-energy related trade is basically nil.

Sanctions on specific areas of conflict are not unique or new and they are not limited to online services you can’t sell anything to Crimea doesn’t matter if it’s physical or not.