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This is slightly off-topic but since this is a common rhetoric, it should be pointed out that this is exclusively for propaganda reasons. It's there so people at home can say "see we're not being cruel, we're just sanctioning a very limited subset of organizations and also medicine and stuff is still allowed through!". Unless that medicine is going to the military of course and numerous other caveats. But in practice there isn't a pharma company in the world that would be caught dead supplying medicines to Iran or Cuba because it's prohibitively complicated to comply with all of the sanctions.

The overbroadness and caution with which these sanctions are implemented in practice and the resulting cruelty is absolutely the point and regardless of how justified we think the sanctions are, we shouldn't delude ourselves otherwise.

(This of course changes nothing about my bold stance that Linus should not be expected to risk jailtime for sanctions evasion just to keep a few emails in a file)