OK. Putin is in the middle of a power play.
He's caught in one, for sure, but power plays happen all the time.
One that our clueless leader doesn't have any ideas how to stop,
One that the clueless population doesn't realize has been played since the end of the war to leverage the position it attained then into world domination. That's kind of dramatic sounding but it is the basic thrust of the PNAC document and US policy in general. America is rolling back Russia, hopes to roll back China too. Russia and China are just trying to maintain what they have at the moment, which is annoying the piss out of the US leadership.
Sort of like an economic blockade designed to punish the guilty.
Where "guilty" is to be interpreted as independent - i.e. not controlled by us.
1) America is no longer a world leader in ANYTHING, let alone a World power. Thanks to Barry's "Change", we're very much on the brink of becoming yet another third-world country.
America still produces quite a lot though it is true that the actual doing has been outsourced, the profits stoill roll back to the mother institutions in the US, so maybe Americans aren't getting the jobs to do the work, the owners are still making out like bandits.
However, there are two areas at least that the US is utterly dominant in and they are military and financial.
a) The US has the most powerful (and expensive) military on the planet and can strike anywhere with very little lead time these days thanks to having over a 1000 land bases scattered through other people's countries. Compare this to the 36 bases that the British Empire had at it's peak and you'll have an idea of how unprecedented this global military reach is.
b) The US financial system owns the world in at least two fundamental ways. First it has the worlds reserve currency. this is a deal that it made as the winner of WWII. The Breton Woods system set up an international settlement system that basically ran on US dollars which meant that the US could make money simply by printing it as other people would then need to purchase those dollars as a reserve (at the cost of real goods and raw materials) so they could participate in international trade cleared through US banking institutions.
The US ended up printing so much money for other people to buy and use that the dollar fell below the value of the gold that was backing it and so, in 1973 thereabouts, the US suspended convertibility to gold and the US dollar became fully fiat. Now unbacked the dollar went into a decline but that was halted by an agreement with the Saudis to only sell oil in USD and in exchange they would re-invest those USD in US institutions and purchase US weapons. The oil exchanges were also US controlled and so countries once again had to acquire USD to buy oil.
What this has meant for decades is that the US can choke a country simply by not processing its payments. If you can't trade for dollars then you can't trade for oil either and you die.
Even though the US fell out of the top oil producing nations slot it still controlled world oil and could make money from it without having to supply it - because the US was the sole supplier of the things you needed to buy oil - dollars.
2) America doesn't actually produce anything any more, so there's nothing we can withhold from Russia that makes any difference. Certainly nothing they don't already produce or can get anywhere else in the world.
So, the US banking system (including the IMF which was also created by Bretton Woods and is a US organ of financial power) controls the flow of goods and oil around the world by controlling the flow of dollars. Russia is a producer of oil (and gas) but not a producer of dollars. they also aren't fully in control of the transaction clearing in Rubles that happens within their own borders if the transactions are done through credit cards, for instance. That means that US financial power can interfere with the internal economy of Russia and with the international economy.
There is a big caveat though. A lot of the companies that would be called on to put the screws to Russia by messing with these powerful levers would end up cutting off a big chunk of their own income. In the state most of the financial institutions are in that would leave them unacceptably exposed to the truly enormous debts most of them are backed by. Helping the government to aggressively sanction Russia would be suicidal.
3) Russia has more power, influence, and access to everything in the world than we do.
Russia has been reaching out and making deals. It has had to. But that network is still very young and doing trades for Rubles an Yuan and Rials is still only a small part of the world economy and not as efficient as doing everything in one currency. It is, however, much safer for everyone.
So, I just have to ask... Who gives a {bleep} about sanctions? What EXACTLY are "sanctions" going to do any more? Why don't the powers that be in DC hear Putin laughing at their reaction?
Sanctions against Russia as a whole would be far to expensive, both to the US and to Europe which relies on Russian energy so also must tread a careful path. So what the powers that be are trying to do is to hurt selected friends of Putin personally. Russia, like the US and every other country, is run by an elite that get wealthy from their positions and use their positions to increase their wealth. Putin's alliance of oligarchs is what lets him rule. If he didn't rule then a rival alliance could take his place. The hope is that the rival oligarchs would see their future fortunes under US rule (like they did when the US ruled Russia through Yeltsin).
The US ruling oligarchic alliance wants to hurt Putin's friends by cutting off their banking privileges and cutting them off from their overseas assets - that is, the US wants to steal their stuff and cancel their credit cards and to do it in such a way that they don't hurt their own oligarchs. Putin needs to offer alternatives to his oligarchs so that they can continue doing business and so he and the Chinese (who would benefit also from having more freedom) and several other countries are moving forward on a plan to build a parallel world monetary system.
This is an existential threat to the US and if the sanctions can't fracture Russia before they fracture the western alliance then the US will have to resort to its other top strength - military.
If the information war goes well then soon the population of the US will hate Putin sufficiently that it will become politically possible to launch military action against Russia itself even to the extent of pre-emptive nuclear war. Or US collapse - but the US is likely to collapse soon anyway even if it did win a nuclear war.