NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.

The sanctions are working. Russians are going back in time and soon will be standing in line for bread.

Chelsea a large premier league team owned by an oligarch has been frozen and he can't sell like he wanted to.

Nikkita Mazepin has been removed from F1 and sanctioned along with his oligarch father and no longer can travel in EU.

Aeroflot(russian airline) grounded its planes because they will get seized and cannot enter EU/US air space.

Other oligarchs are moving their expensive yachts because those are getting seized. Their other assets such as properties and bank accounts are being frozen all over the world and they a lot real estate in the UK. This definitely hurts.

The list goes on and on.

> NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.

Do you really think the Russian government will withdraw from Ukraine because people can't buy McDonald's in Moscow anymore?

China isn't sanctioning Russia. I bet the oligarchs and other elietes will continue to get whatever Western status goods they want through smuggling (just like North Korea!), and the Russia people will have sufficient Chinese-manufactured consumer goods (like everyone everywhere else), just equivalents with different logos.

"The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China? Would that feel claustrophobic for these wealthy Russians? Could they do something about it, throwing their weight to shift some power balance and replace their dictator with another one more in line with the actual interests of the Russian riling class?

> "The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China?

We'll see, but "being unhappy" is a far cry from deciding to take on some KGB goon who appears to have no compunction against murdering rivals.

I highly doubt there will be regime change in Russia because some politically-connected oligarchs' wives can't flout their Hermes handbags in Paris. That seems far more like a fantasy than a realistic expectation.

I agree. Just saying that it's not that oligarchs will just get their goods from china and nothing will change for them. Whether that's going to have any impact whatsoever is another story.

> and soon will be standing in line for bread

No. Sure, they won't have access to Western technological miracle products like Netflix, Facebook, and PornHub, but they have plenty of grain production, processing, transportation, and baking capacity for as much bread as they want, particularly since they'll be exporting less of their own wheat.

Your examples are very telling. Wow, Russians are being excluded from sportsball, motor racing, sex tourism, and extravagant yachting excursions! Nothing of value was lost.

Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.

> Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.

And for stuff like that, there's always front companies and smuggling (if they can't find what they need on the market in China). IIRC, that's what they used to do during Soviet times.

Putin meets with oligarchs, the richest people in the country have access and communicate with governments and have the ability to affect policy making.

Placing sanctions on people close to Putin and freezing their soccer team worth billions of dollars definitely has an impact.

Many car manufacturers are pulling out and not selling parts. We live in a globalized society and Russia was a part of it. Putin was betting on oil/natural gas money but that soon will be gone.

Our countries should send an ultimatum: if no agreement have been found by next week, frozen assets will be nationalized. Having Chelsea belong to BoJo would be fun :)

Everyone agrees sanctions will make Russia poorer. What is less clear, and none of your examples show, is if it will change Russia's geopolitical actions.

I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.

> I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.

But we do know that it is currently an extremely totalitarian country that developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs while under sanctions, and it continues to have a gun pointed at the head of South Korea (e.g. enough dug in artillery to level Seoul a couple times over).

It's not like a lack of sanctions would change their behavior either though, maybe nothing we do will change their behavior. In that case they can do less damage to the rest of the world if they are poor and cut off than if they are rich and able to trade freely.

And there is still a chance sanctions will change their behavior even if in some cases like with NK it hasn't worked.

Sanctions affect dictatorships and oligarchies differently.

> It should be noted that sanctions have done nothing to change the behavior of North Korea's leadership to be more palatable to the West.

Sanctions aren't chosen because they are effective at changing behavior, but because they limit capacity if they fail to change behavior. The sanctions on Russia are not “we believe Putin will behave in response to the sanctions” but “we intend to destroy Russia’s economy and thereby limit it's ability to engage in aggression until and unless we are convinced that Putin has made a durable course correction.”

How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.

> How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.

But it is possible to know that their behavior continues to be extremely unacceptable to the West. So if your goal with sanctions is to stop the invasion of Ukraine and to get Russia to stop threatening its neighbors with similar, it's very likely that sanctions won't work.

IMHO, sanctions are something the West does when it doesn't want to solve a problem but still wants to feel like it's doing something.

I also think sanctions will end up being counterproductive. They'll fail to address the military situation AND geopolitically they'll push Russia into a deeper alliance with China, strengthening the latter.

You've already seen an example of that with Belarus. A few years ago it got sanctioned and its leader was forced to turn to Russia for help. Now it's militarily supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.