Maybe not Putin personally, but it’s an autocracy. If/when the Russian government comes knocking on their door and tells them that they need to do x, y, and z with the kernel, otherwise they will mysteriously fall from a high window (an extremely credible threat these days), what do you think they’ll do? What do you think you would do?

Sucks for the majority of Russian developers that want to participate in the FOSS community, but I get it. It is a national security issue.

This is kind of how sanctions are meant to work. We could have a discussion about whether or not sanctions should be used as it is sort of a form of collective punishment, but that’s a separate argument.

They want regular Russians to “feel it,” so that there is more pressure from the populace to get them to stop doing the shit they were sanctioned over. Obviously, in an autocracy, it’s much easier to just ignore and suppress dissent. But, generally, the idea is to make everybody feel the consequences for invading a sovereign nation.