Russia keep seeing what they can get away with and then push harder. Since nobody is willing to apply enough meaningful punishment due to fear of escalation, and they successfully propagandized/bought the US Republican party, they're winning on this axis.
More sanctions should have been imposed when they shot down a passenger plane and killed several hundred Dutch civilians.
True, the cheapest option was always to hid hard with sanction on Russia as early as the first Chechen war and establish backup for Russian energy. But instead, Germany still build Nordstream after Georgia.
German politics was clearly heavily compromised as well, beyond the basic self interest of cheap gas. See Wirecard and Jan Marsalek.
The interesting question is how compromised British politics has been. Lots of very suspicious things (secret Boris Johnson meeting against the advice of security services; appointment of Lord Lebedev), but UK support for the Ukraine war has been unwavering.
Yeah, and its leadership held to account; for some reason the results of the investigation was that a number of individuals were marked as suspect, while IMO the entire military leadership all the way up the chain should be held accountable.
I really hope this war ends, and ends up with Russia paying for repatriations, including this case.
Unfortunately I don't see the reparations coming about without the war getting much, much larger first, like a EU-NATO ground invasion of Russia. Which violates a whole load of red lines and would get a lot of people killed. But maybe Russia will force it to happen regardless.
(what is happening is turning the asset freeze into asset seizure, but this is complicated - rightly - by human rights law, because most of the assets are nominally private)
More sanctions should have been imposed when they shot down a passenger plane and killed several hundred Dutch civilians.