This is just wrong, the sanctions Biden and other western nations put in place yesterday are new sanctions on the Russian banks Putin and the main oligarchs use to launder their wealth....its very personal and deliberately done to hurt those closest to Putin the most by targeting those top oligarchs.
If Putin takes the NATO countries moving troops around and sending the Ukraine tons of military equipment as a green light he needs to reevaluate his thought processes. Countries are literally sending military hardware into Ukraine as we speak....and the Ukraine has 120k troops on the eastern front with Donbass....this will not be a cake walk for Russia if they go full bore, they have the numbers but the Ukrainian army has had weeks to prepare positions and setup defense layers that will cost the Russians heavily especially in armor, just in the last month or so the Ukrainians have been given a few thousand Javelin missiles these will kill a lot of Russia armor.
In fact Putin has painted himself into a rather nasty corner honestly, if he backs down now he looks hella weak to the oligarchs and at home, if he keeps pushing he ends up in a major shooting war with a country he cant take and hold, with sanctions crushing the Russian economy, hundreds or even thousands of dead bodies going home in a war that literally no one in Russia wants. All the while just increasing the need to put those countries in NATO to prevent crap like this from happening again.
