Just like I said a couple days back. The EU and UK must act as if they are at war with Russian oil and gas. They must not shy away from historic investment in renewable and for the near future they must find alternative source.

If they were at war with Russia they would be cut off anyway.

Peaceful co-existence like during the Cold War.. in other words, let us terrorize and threaten the small nations around as in peace. Fucking assholes.

And all it took was two weeks of war and atrocities for him to do it.  It's sad that it took Ukrainian officials publicly pointing out that the US and its allies were basically funding Russia's war effort by continuing to buy their invader's main export despite sanctioning everything else.

It's the right move, but it shouldn't have required Ukraine begging/pleading for it to happen.

That's the underground, subtle point of sanctions, though. No one in the Russian government is going to have a change of heart over this stuff. And people won't complain if they aren't uncomfortable. But if you get the people uncomfortable, you increase the chances of an uprising within the nation, which will lead to soldiers abandoning their duties/joining the rebellion. The West is hoping the Russian people and armies will rise up against Putin and resolve this problem from within.  Will they suffer in the meantime? Yes. But a LOT less than will suffer with a global war. It's the least lethal strategy.

A lot of European countries are going to continue to buy Russian oil. Germany's Olaf Scholz has stated bluntly that Germany will not be participating in any bans on Russian oil. Germany is Russia's third largest customer after China and the Netherlands. And of course, China sure doesn't care enough about Ukraine to pass up the opportunity to get its hands on Russian oil. China alone accounts for 32 percent of Russian oil exports. 

The US accounts for less than a percent of Russian oil exports. 

Than they should at least put heavy duty on Russian oil imports, forcing Russian producer to heavily discount and reducing their profits margin, crippling in the same time the ability to use revenue to efficiently fund war effort.

I believe I just read Russia threatening to end oil exports to Germany if the West keeps this up, so they will limit their exporting potential themselves, possibly. Regardless, if even 20-30% oil-exporting is reduced, it will be absolutely disasterous on Russia's economy. But long term, the damage is undoable. The movements to go electric just got a permanent shot in the arm, plus there are many people that are okay with getting more expensive gas permanently from other sources and just feel done with Russia, so Russia's oil industry will never recover to what it once was. And yeah, that benefits China in the short term because they make the vast majority of electric batteries, but the rest of the world is catching up on making batteries and pretty soon we won't have to get any of our essentialls from these crazy, communist/authoritarian, murderous, freedom-limiting governments and just block them out of major world trade until their citizens actually do something about their leadership.

The more disaster, the more likely the citizens are to rise up and overthrow their government. It's happened before in the tundra and the west knows it could happen again. Hopefully, this time, they actually have non-oligarchy backed leadership take over. The West didn't get to be the way it is from complacent citizens unwilling to risk it all. If Russia wants to be prosperous again, then their people, in mass, need to actually do something about it.

I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to, it is that they can’t. Countries in Eastern Europe in particular get the vast majority of their oil&gas from Russia and they can’t just flick a switch and get it from somewhere else. The US can ban Russian fuel imports is that they get so like of it from Russia. The UK as well (which is only banning oil imports) gets much of its supply from elsewhere. A country like Germany I think get more than 50% of its supply from Russia. I’d been amazed if they were trying to find ways to cut their dependency but they simply can’t ban them on the spot.

Lets put this more in perspective.  While it may seem easy to make this decision its really not all that simple.  As people forget, the Biden Administration was actively making deals with multiple nations to make sure that putting sanctions on Russian oil would not leave the US and also EU in a serious situation where we are at 10 dollars a gallon or without oil for EU since they are so dependent.  While it may seem that the administration was sitting on their hands its actually not correct.  Its like leaving a job without actually having another one lined up.  The administration needed to make deals and shift resources and thus allow them to make this move without to much cost in the short term.  Long term of course would be more investment in renewal energy.

There isn't a simple solution. I think the simplest one would be get the Ukrainian pilots driven to Poland where they fly the fighters back to their Ukranian air bases. But even that could cause issues.