President Putin's nation
These restrictions are part of a raft of sanctions brought against President Putin's nation by America ...
I realize this is just a bit of mild trolling in the best El Reg's tradition - but I'll bite anyways. Russia is not a President Putin's nation - in any event not any more than the U.S. is President Trump's nation, or Toronto was a Ford nation when that crack- and booze-addicted deviant was running it.
Treating an entire proud and resourceful nation as an enemy to be contained can have only one effect: it will become your enemy, and it will unite around its leadership, even if most people don't like or trust their leaders very much. The two very prominent cases in point are Cuba and Iran - which both have been under crippling US sanctions for generations. The only thing these sanctions achieved was to prop up the regimes which most likely would have fallen by themselves without the US helpfully obliging by supplying a very visible and loud external threat.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
