Clueless Joe thinks his threats of sanctions will deter Russia . History says not .
The US and EU slapped severe sanctions on Russia after they seized Crimea .The hit on Russia's GDP barely moved the needle;a 1.5% hit . It did not reduce popular support for Vladdy. It did not force Russia to return the peninsula to Ukraine. It did not help any internal opposition to Putty .It did not hurt his core oligarch compadres . It did not address the issues of self determination . It did nothing to signal NATO resolve because he knows NATO will never back up sanctions with the threat of meaningful miliary force.
What it did was advance a greater Russi-China economic cooperation . Russia is divesting itself of dollars in favor of Yuan
.
Why are Russia and China ditching the U.S. dollar? - Russia Beyond (rbth.com)
In reality what is happening is a greater Moscow -Beijing -Tehran axis while NATO has demonstrated again and again that it is a paper tiger .NATOs last military intervention in Afghanistan ended in an embarrassing disaster . NATO has demilitarized to the tune of more than half it's tanks since 2000 .
• Chart: Nato capability reductions & cost cutting. A step too far? | Statista
The willingness of NATO to intervene short of symbolic sanctions is at best mixed. UK evidently wants to give defensive weapons ;but had to fly around Germany . Germany ;dominated by Greens pukes worries about offending Russia,their gas station.
So how effective are sanctions ? I would like to see the example when they meaningfully reversed a nations behavior . I can think of one when the world united to pressure South Africa to give up it's nukes .
There was a decade of sanctions against Saddam Hussein in Iraq . Those failed . Sanctions against Iran have failed to deter their nuclear program. Sanctions against the NORKs have not stopped the Kim regime from developing nukes and intercontinental ballistic missiles . Decades of sanctions did not dislodge the Castros in Cuba . Sanctions against Serbia did not compel them to abandon Kosovo (military intervention did ) Sanctions did not prevent Myanmar military takeovers .
Further the unintended consequences of sanctions is that they most often hurt the people in the country you are trying to protect.
Sanctions will not work and military response by NATO is a non-starter .
So where to go from here ?
Russia's stated goal is the protection of Russian populations in border states. They also want a buffer against NATO expansion up to their border . There is a significant ethnic Russian populations in Donetsk and Luhansk regions .
One possible solution is to grant autonomous zones for these regions .
Another possible solution is what happened during the Cold war when the 1955 Austria State treaty secured Austrian independence with the provision that it did not join NATO. Austria became a stable and free buffer state between WARSAW PACT and NATO nations