The US army is _my_ army, even if I don't agree with all their actions or have any direct control over them what so ever.
The place where I borrow a book is _my_ library, and the sports team I follow is _my_ team.
The Russian people are not in control and likely the majority do not agree with what is happening, but it is still their army. And the Russian army is made up of Russian people.
The discomfort put on Russian families puts pressure on the Russian people in the military.
Currently everyone who resists Putins will is arrested or worse. However that is simply not a scalable solution to keep an unhappy population from fighting back against the cause of their unhappiness.
In this case Putin unilaterally decided to attack their cousins and take the wrath of the entire world. He is the cause of their unhappiness, and they will squeeze him out like a tick.
> Currently everyone who resists Putins will is arrested or worse. However that is simply not a scalable solution to keep an unhappy population from fighting back
It is not only scalable, moreover the regime is 100% prepared to scale it. The regime's prison/riot control machine will kill 10s of thousands and imprison 100s of thousands overnight if need be.
You clearly have no idea of what's going on there and what the response is like.
Russian people are unarmed (nobody owns weapons and they aren't readily available to anyone on some black market). The police/riot police/national guard are alienated from general population and will retaliate as if protestors are "enemy" (it was the case in every single instance, their never ever went easy on protestors).
The regime change can come either from the army (worst case scenario) or from the cabinet (best case scenario). A crushed civil uprising will just signal to the elites that they need not worry about the masses.
Thus calling for regular russian people to take up arms / topple the government is just pushing the whole thing to a senseless, pointless catastrophe. Painful, direct sanctions on elites AND all of their relatives/close employees (up to 3 degrees of separation), on the other hand..
I don't think we will agree with each other. I wrote a longer response, but it was just reiterating my previous points.
But I'll will leave with a rhetorical straw man argument.
Russia has a mandatory draft. These people did not choose to join the army, similar to how most people did not choose which country they live in. Is sending weapons that may kill these forced soldiers better or worse than providing economic pain to the entire population?
In both cases people who lack free will be affected.
The place where I borrow a book is _my_ library, and the sports team I follow is _my_ team.
The Russian people are not in control and likely the majority do not agree with what is happening, but it is still their army. And the Russian army is made up of Russian people.
The discomfort put on Russian families puts pressure on the Russian people in the military.
Currently everyone who resists Putins will is arrested or worse. However that is simply not a scalable solution to keep an unhappy population from fighting back against the cause of their unhappiness.
In this case Putin unilaterally decided to attack their cousins and take the wrath of the entire world. He is the cause of their unhappiness, and they will squeeze him out like a tick.