Removal of markets is a form of economic attack.

Everyone is watching the growing tensions between Russia and the west as the global economy gets more and more uncertain.  Putin is on public record saying he doesn't understand why citizens of the west don't take what is happening more seriously.  I've seen Putin calmly discussing this in various forums on Youtube and I have seen similar things said by others in articles like this one.  To me, Putin is not a barking dog and his tail is not wagging.  He's grumbling a low growl.  He feels like he's being threatened and diminished and there is definitely a line in the sand which the west better not cross or we are going to see military action.

One of the major ways to fuck with the leaders of an opposing country is to do so economically.  If you can hurt the people then you can get the people of that country to hate their leader.  From everything I have seen this is not going to work with Putin.  His people love him and they are used to hard times.  So I think going this route is only going to make the people back Putin even more, including in more extreme scenarios that include military involvement.

Removal of markets is an economic attack.  Since our global economy is based on electronic money for trade, block access to foreign banking infrastructure can easily be considered an economic attack.  In today's news, NatWest bank of UK, which is one of the big four transaction clearing centers there, has told Russia's official exported news service, Russia Today (RT) that it no longer wants their business.  Well if this is not using commercial assets to politically attack Russia then I don't know what is.  Obviously something was said on the channel that struck a nerve and so the UK is going to punish them like this.

As RT said on the matter, so much for free speech.  Free speech is only OK as long as you say what the ruling oligarchs want you to say.  Anything past that will get you economic sanctions.  While this is not a good thing, it is not the real reason for this post.  The main thing I want to point out here is that once you throw in with a particular system you become captured by it.  For example, lots of people want to get rid of physical currency completely.  The biggest issue I see with this is that it then becomes trivial to cut off from all access to food, gas, clothing, etc. anyone who does not toe the line.  No court decree is needed because the action is taken by an apparently private entity (a bank).  Of course, the bank was probably "asked" to do this by corrupt self serving government.

We should never agree to going completely token free in our monetary system as it eliminates the ability for an individual to transact without bank permission.  Once we let them fool us into using all digital currency we allow them to threaten any and all of us at will with being cut out of the market place.  It doesn't matter how much wealth you have if there is no market to spend it in.