As some others have said already, banning Russia from SWIFT isn't very useful, and may in fact be counterproductive long-term. Banning them from SWIFT is like this: Imagine that most of Russia's exports were sent to the outside world via UPS, and you ban Russia from using UPS. It's very disruptive short-term (for both sides of the trade), but they're just going to switch to Fedex or whatever. Banning Russia from SWIFT is like that: it's short-term very disruptive, but it's not that hard for Russia to find an alternative, and long-term the ban weakens SWIFT. Banning Russia from SWIFT sounds like you're banning sending money to Russia by any means, but it's not. The West could ban sending money to Russia by any means, but Europe is highly dependent on Russian imports, so they're just going to pretend to "completely cut off Russia" by banning them from SWIFT.
The most damaging thing the West could do without putting boots on the ground would probably be to confiscate Russia's central bank reserves like the US did with Afghanistan's central bank.
If you wanted to get rid of Putin ASAP, I think the most effective thing that could be done would be to put a $1 billion bounty on Putin's head, plus a promise of immunity for any past misdeeds. You have to imagine that many of Putin's close associates would rather this nutcase be dead. The West was more-or-less fine with Russia's internal authoritarianism, and Russia's oligarchs had a good thing going, but now Putin has screwed it all up for them. All of these sanctions are clearly designed to eventually make Russians angry enough to get Putin toppled, but a bounty+immunity would be a lot more effective. (I think that issuing this sort of bounty would be considered an act of war, though.)
I was surprised that Kyiv didn't fall last night, and I keep hoping that the Russians are somehow fought off, but it's almost unimaginable that Kyiv isn't going to fall eventually. The force differential is just too large. If Zelenskyy is dedicated to the idea of Ukraine fighting a protracted resistance in the same vein as Afghanistan or Vietnam, he should record a really good speech to broadcast after he is inevitably killed by the Russians, so that he can become an ideal martyr.
Tsar Bomba
the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested
...their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ)
...In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[14] fusion tamper which figured in the design but which was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout
...8-kilometre-wide (5.0 mi) fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km (620 mi) away.[49] The mushroom cloud was about 67 km (42 mi) high[50] (over seven times the height of Mount Everest)
- The flare was visible at a distance of more than 1,000 km.[52] It was observed in Norway, Greenland and Alaska.
- The explosion's nuclear mushroom rose to a height of 67 km.[14] The shape of the "hat" was two-tiered; the diameter of the upper tier was estimated at 95 km (59 mi), the lower tier at 70 km (43 mi). The cloud was observed 800 km (500 mi) from the explosion site.
- The blast wave circled the globe three times,[16] with the first one taking 36 hours and 27 minutes.
- A seismic wave in the earth's crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times.
- The atmospheric pressure wave resulting from the explosion was recorded three times in New Zealand
- Glass shattered in windows 780 km (480 mi) from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.
- Ionization of the atmosphere caused interference to radio communications even hundreds of kilometers from the test site for about 40 minutes.
And this was 1960 technology.
Lets all read up on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction and then think how much we want to move the doomsday clock forward before we start putting bounties on heads. This blue marble is already just 100min away from midnight
