Those polls you got your source from are actually polls done by state-run polling facilities. of course poeple are going to say what the state wants to hear. here's a video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uQCNjIHeqU

Btw, by saying that "80% of Russians support this war", you're spreading Russian state propaganda.

And of course protests in Russia died down, people get jailed for like 10-15 years in prison if they protest, so by fear of getting jailed, protestors stop. it isn't pretty but it's how the system works.

Where do those stats come from? The stats I have found are significantly lower than that. It is also important to note that Russians who are against Putin and the war are far less likely to respond to a survey asking them about the war. In the survey I found, only 18% of citizens surveyed that were against Putin felt comfortable sharing this. It's not at all unlikely that many were too scared to say they were against the war.

It feels you are heavily oversimplifying this to support your beliefs. Even if it were true that most Russians supported the war, many of them are faced with constant propaganda, and it would not be entirely fair to contribute this to any moral failing.

There’s an abundance of contemporary evidence that shows this doesn’t work but it’s basically a foreign policy meme at this point. We tried this in Iraq and it just ended up killing a bunch of children and had no effect on Saddam’s hold on power.

People are sanctioned, people are unhappy, people protest their government that allowed it to happen. It’s how you put pressure on the leadership of a country.

This doesn't follow. First of all, no change happens internally in the USA despite its own citizens complaining of material conditions; so to say that people being unhappy and protesting necessarily leads to change is false. Second, every other sentence people say about Russia is calling it "authoritarian", "dictatorship", etc: you can't simultaneously pretend its an authoritarian dictatorship and also that the people protesting have any say in its trajectory.

You can’t force Russia’s hand in this, but you can make the situation for their people uncomfortable.

Which is just wrong. You're making the everyday civilian uncomfortable. You aren't doing anything against those who actually make decisions. Instead you're punishing someone for their nationality, or where they were born or choose to live. It's punishment for something they didn't do and it's not constructive.

The alternative would be to say “Russia pls open the grain corridor again” and I think you can imagine their response.

Sure, I understand that you're saying Russia isn't going to just cooperate with requests. But it's also not going to be any more likely to cooperate because you've made the lives of their citizens, or people of Russian ethnicity living on foreign soil, any harder.

In the end this just punishes innocent people and does nothing to achieve the stated goal.

Sanctions have never once shown to lead to regime change. There’s entire books on the effects of sanctions, it can actually serve to strengthen support. The primary effect of sanctions, in every case though, is suffering for the regular people.

When dialogue fails, war follows.

Russia does not seem interested in dialogue whatsoever

And what power do Russian expatriots have to effect change in their home country exactly? Huge numbers left precisely because they disagree with the politics, which poses a huge demographic problem for Russia. Forcing them to go back would be counterproductive, not to mention plain xenophobic.

You can't simultaneously call Russia an authoritarian dictatorship and say that its people have the power to change the country's trajectory.

Because the only way to force change in a country, is to push it’s people to make that change.

The correct way to say this is: "the only way to force change in a country, is to push the people who can make change to make that change".

Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.