By Mary Harrington writing for The Post
The biggest weapon being used against Russia isn't force or the military, it's not even necessarily the imposition of sanctions from other governments. It's the willingness of private companies choosing to withdraw their business from Russia and choosing not to interact with its population. For example, FIFA and UEFA have chosen to kick Russia and its clubs out of their competition, something that is meant to impact the Russian citizens. In addition, Disney has stated that they will not release any films in Russia, something that other movie companies are likely to do. And as of now, Russians cannot fly to any other destination in Europe and it's become extremely difficult to fly domestically.
The plan is to put pressure on the Russian citizens, make them suffer and in doing so they rebel against their government forcing them to surrender their attack on Ukraine.
Like with traditional weapons, this new method of warfare still results in the innocents suffering. The ones who had no say or input into whether Russia should go into war are used as collateral. With that being said, it's hard to argue that this new method of warfare isn't preferential to using force and military.
From the article,
Big Tech and energy markets have now been explicitly conscripted as tools of great power conflict. Privateers on the scale of an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg are actors with an unnerving reach. This development arguably just moves the West to where China has been for some time, but one thing is certain: free-trade Tories can forget “Global Britain”. There’s no road back to naïve commercial internationalism now, even if we wanted one. We would be wise to calculate our food, manufacturing and commercial dependencies accordingly.