So, two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the governments of Canada, the USA, the UK and probably others are sanctioning a bunch more individuals and entities with connections to Putin and the Russian military-industrial complex.
Canada is slapping sanctions on 10 new people and 153 "entities". The USA is adding 500 more individual and entities to its sanctions list. The UK is adding 50 to its list, which is hardly even worth the cost of a press release.
So, my question is: if these people are helping Putin with his illegal war and therefore worth sanctioning, why were they not sanctioned before? In the early days of the war, there were numerous announcements of new sanctions, and every time I thought to myself: why announce this now? Why did they not sanction everyone worth sanctioning right at the start?
It's almost like they were doing the bare minimum, deliberately saving up some for future press releases so that they can still be seen to be doing something. Is all those just performative, or is there some hidden logic that I'm not seeing? How many more Russian warmongers are there out there, carrying on with business as usual, who are still not being sanctioned?
UPDATE
Just as an aside, I had to do a bit of a double take when I wrote the word "warmongers" in this entry. I initially wrote "warmongerers", but that just looked wrong. And yes, as has been pointed out, a fishmonger deals in fish, an ironmonger deals in iron, so of course a warmonger deals in war. Why, then, would anyone add an extra "-er"?
Well, it seems that, although "warmonger" is the original word, and still the one considered more "correct", "warmongerer" is in fact a recognized word, although you won't find it in all dictionaries. When you consider that "warmonger" is also a verb, meaning to advocate war, then "warmongerer", meaning "one who warmongers", does actually make some sense. So, don't be so quick to dismiss!
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