Well close to 300 million people lived in the USSR. Only 8 million of them lived in the Baltic states.
I still personally think the (mostly) peaceful dissolution of the USSR was probably one the best things that happened in the past 100 years. But transition to capitalism was extremely mismanaged, even in the “successful” countries.
Too many people think of Europe in terms of Germany, France, Italy, UK and Spain. There are _many_ countries in Europe who know exactly what it feels like when Russia comes to "liberate" and what it means for the future of these territories.
Justification for what? If Russia wanted to support russian ethnic people in Ukraine it would not invade Ukraine, but offer non-destructive help to those people.
The reason these sanctions are harming normal people is that Europe is driving for a change in Russia that will never happen unless the people blame its own government for the situation.
It's absolutely possible, it would just come with an enormous impact on citizens and the economy.
The result would be exploding prices, shortages and rationing of gas, potentially even power cuts at night or reduced availability of power to industry.
But the EU countries could absolutely do it if they really wanted to.
But this is also a big escalation.
Energy exports are the lifeline of the Russian economy. Canada just banned crude oil imports from Russia yesterday. Without a delay Russia just stopped diplomatic relations with the country and withdrew all diplomats.
It's basically a declaration of war to them, because if it spreads and even countries like China theoretically were forced to join in, they would really collapse.
And if Russia is pushed I to a corner there's no telling what they might do.
A response late is better than no response. I believe what you are saying is that if some countries were destroyed, others should be as well? Europe protects itself as it considers Ukraine a part of Europe, that's not racist, that's pragmatist.
So, by this logic Facebook is the good guy, because it is receiving less money by helping 3rd parties without its capabilities also invade users privacy, while taking a cut of the profits?
That's called contextual targeting:
"
If iOS 14 users opt out, they will still be shown ads, but they’ll be based on other methods like contextual targeting rather than based on their IDFA.
"
https://clearcode.cc/blog/apple-idfa/#apple-skadnetwork
The issue is not effectiveness as much as measurement. Advertisers value the insight obtained by tracking user response to ads. That is something they are willing to pay premium for. Without the ability to do measurements, Facebook does not provide as much value.
Sometimes I don't understand what advertisers mean when they keep reassuring that all the data they suck is totally anonymized with the objective of delivering more personalized and relevant ads. How can it be personalized if you can't pick me out of the anonymized lot? If you can, then what good is the anonymity? Probably its me who just doesn't get it.
