>>518861438
>Sanctions don't mean Russia to collapse. They mean to make it poor, alienated and ultimately as powerless against Europe, as North Korea is powerless against South Korea. There's so many of them because nobody wants to wait decades for effects.
Sanctions are basically a kind of blockade. You can blockade North Korea and keep it poor because they have no resources and aren't strategically important. You cannot blockade Russia, or at least, doing so is the equivalent of imposing an embargo against yourself.
But you are correct that the goal of sanctions is to keep Russia poor. And the reason they want to keep Russia poor is to keep it politically unstable, undermine Putin's legitimacy, and to push a "Color Revolution" like we did in Ukraine, Georgia, etc, to install a western puppet.
On top of the sanctions, we also wanted to push NATO expansion and to otherwise encircle Russia and to build up a massive military threat on Russia's borders to force Russia to overspend on its military. Thereby diverting its limited resources from its consumer economy to the military.
The actual reason the West won the Cold War was the Sino-Soviet split. Which not only subsidized the West with cheap Chinese labor, but also created a massive security threat on Russia's eastern Border. Leaving Russia sandwiched between NATO to the west, China to the east, and fundamentalist Islam to the south(which we funded through the Saudis and various madrasas because they were anti-communist).