The Western electorate is indifferent about you. But it's only fair, because you are indifferent--at best--about them. If there were a strong domestic Russian opposition movement there would be much more sympathy. But the Russian population has been successfully depoliticized. Those who care are dead, imprisoned, emigrated, internally-exiled, or live as serfs bound to a genocidal Tsar. Oh well. Bummer, bro.
The financial sanctions are not about you. They're about constraining the resources of a genocidal mafia regime waging direct war against its neighbors and hybrid war against "The Collective West(tm)".
With that in mind, a far better argument in favor of loosening sanctions to allow Russians to spend abroad is that those foreign currency outflows will put further pressure on the ruble and Russia's limited forex liquidity.
Bitching about sanctions is ultimately pointless, though, as CBR would almost certainly restrict foreign payments on their own even if sanctions weren't in place, exactly because of those financial constraints.
Ultimately your payments problem boils down to Russia wasting all its resources and potential on a genocidal war of imperial aggression and that is what you should spend all your energy to address.
I'm definitely pro Ukraine, but Grishka also has a point here. I think it's well worth it to take a few steps back and consider that the war was indeed somewhat provoked by NATO (although I am truly a NATO supporter, let's not convince ourselves that they are completely innocent all the time).
Putin won't be in charge forever, and they can stop the war literally right now by ceding some territory to Russia. After which NATO membership can be given to Ukraine. No more sanctions for our Russian HN members.
I just want to clarify — I do oppose this war and this government. The only point I'm making here is that some of the sanctions disproportionately affect regular people who have no say in the matter (the government doesn't take any feedback and trying to protest anyway gets you jailed) and are bypassed easily given enough will and resources. Some other sanctions, especially the personal ones against the government elites, do have the intended effect of forcing those people to fully immerse themselves into the country they themselves have built over the decades.
The problem I see is that there's no process going on to evaluate whether each particular sanction has its intended effect, and repeal those that clearly don't.
I think it's difficult for a lot of Russians to understand that the tried and true political strategy, "keep out of politics and they'll leave you alone" has been taken off the table. It turns out that letting a criminal regime do whatever it wants might have some personal blow-back after all.
Like it or not, if you are in Russia you are making a political choice to be part of this regime. You contribute to its economy and tax base and contribute, directly or indirectly, to an organization which is right now committing atrocities in Ukraine to steal their land and children and erase their history and culture.
When I look at the injustices that exist in that part of the world, the plight of the well-off holidaying Ivan from Moscow or Peter ranks near the bottom of my list.
What's more, the relative volume of Russians' complaints about sanctions compared to the (almost nonexistent) volume of Russians' complaints about the wide-scale torture of Ukrainian PoWs, systematic kidnapping of Ukrainian children, murder and 'filtration' of civilians, etc. reveals a disheartening reality: Russians only care about themselves.
So why should we care about them?
Any time or energy spent worrying about Russians is far better spent worrying about Russia's victims: Ukrainians.
