This is very bizarre. All sanctions have carve-outs for exactly the Cisco products (so that customers can always safely get online!) Now it will all get replaced with Huawei products. How is this better?
Part of the point of sanctions is to reduce Russia's options, it's understood that some products will just get replaced by ones from outside the geopolitical "West".
Presumably they weren't already using those other options before because they were worse for some reason or another, and so it still hurts to have to switch. Plus, having fewer options may mean it's harder to negotiate a good deal.
Breaking the inertia on a whole bunch of geopolitical norms has been the largest result of all this mess.
Freezing foreign reserves and restricting access to international financial messaging systems etc is probably the biggest change to the status quo and the reverberations of that have set in motion huge changes.
The unilateral sanctions have been levied before, but usually only against "backwater" places that have no chance to fight back and thus most countries with a functional military and economy were never too scared of it.
Applying the same sort of doctrine against a functional (even if barely so) nation like Russia has set off alarm bells in every nation that doesn't identify as "Western". This is why you are seeing actual progress towards international trade being settled in non-USD currencies. The breaking of petrodollar and the shifting allegiance of OPEC away from the West after ~40 years of tenuous "cooperation" is also a big consequence of this.
It's very unclear waters ahead now. I'm not really sure breaking all these norms was worth it vs just sending traditional support and utilising traditional sanctions. If Russia was expelled from Ukraine within months of enacting it then I might have had a different view but now I'm sceptical this was a good idea.
A mistake to...sanction a country for invading their democratic neighbor for no other reason than imperial ambitions? A country that's kidnapping children en masse and flinging missiles at civilian targets while speedrunning their way to maximum war crimes?
No, it would've been wrong not to sanction Russia. The West's only mistake has been not sending arms to Ukraine even faster.
The problem is, is that it is just not Russia. Other countries are starting to learn that they could be sanctioned or cut off. Not only that the assets of private citizens can be seized easily. Wars happen, conflicts happen after all something similar could have been said about the Middle East.
Until they are replaced they will not get updates, leaving them open for possible intrusions. Let them have Chinese equipment, starving them of western technology to reverse engineer, steal or sell to competitors isn’t a bad thing either.
Probably, but will they be able to reverse engineer and produce successfully?
Everything I've read about Russia indicates that, while they have plenty of smart engineers*, the business culture and civic society are so messed up that they have lots of problems actually making things in practice. Too much corruption and people trying to take advantage of each other.
* Well, maybe less now, since so many IT workers fled
