The drip feeding of sanctions gets you nowhere, people get used to them as they materialise over a long period and they learn to live with them and work around them, it needed to be a full blown slam dunk to coin the American phrase. The problem with that is the west were not willing to suffer the drop in living standards and fall back into recession they could have brought on. It takes a strong willed and firm leader to enforce them, something we all in the west lack with the spineless sycophants we have in power today.