No but it’s a good thing for a few reasons (1) XMR really needs to focus on it’s primary mission. Blockchain based smart contracts make privacy harder. (2) There is no consensus on a good smart contract language is yet, especially for UTXOs so it’s best to wait until a standard emerges (note there are several challengers to EVMs that might yet replace it), (3) Once something is on the public blockchain, it’ll stay forever so it needs to be done right the first time so we need a mature smart contract standard (see previous point), (4) It can be handled by a parallel merge mined chain for added flexibility and experimentation so XMR might never need it, (5) the comining implementation of FCMPs has featurres that will make it easier to do, so any effort spent now will need to be thrown out. (6) Most common smart contracts like automatic payments and smart contracts and payment channels can be done by using time locked XMR and checkpoints (with clear roll back rules) and step signatures. These can be integrated into wallets to run in the background, so it might not even be necessary for most cases to hard code opcodes onto the main block chain. All you need to do is leave your phone on to handle the checkpoints. Atomic swaps and the “Monero Subscriptions Wallet” already prove this is possible. All that’s needed is a more full featured wallet extension library that handles all the typical smart contract cases (i.e. currently there are thousands of smart contracts out there…most are abandoned and only a handful are actually useful. We could implement those).

Given Monero’s anonymity and the media lock out, it would be hard to know how popular Monero is in Russia. Haveno isn’t the best measure of adoption. Perhaps Russians prefer swapping Monero for other easier to acquire crypto on Russia-agnostic DEXes? Remember also Russian citizens are masters of covert communications. Back when computer programs were on cassette tapes a common strategy was to embed programs and documents in the middle of extremely hard to listen to music like high volume death metal or MERZBOW Woodpecker #1. Any guard charged with finding illegal content would have to listen through hours of ear-bleeding and harsh music before they could detect that “something” was being hidden. Perhaps there’s an active trade in the underground market which the average citizen is a part of. Perhaps they have an active independent street exchange as is available in Argentina (from what I know, street vendors tend to give the best rates).

these sanctions are actually hurting the individual citizens more than the government to whom they should be targeted.

Of course. That’s the point. Sanctions rarely ever harm the leaders. Do you think 1000 times harsher sanctions would affect the North Korean dictator one bit? Sanctions are meant to cause so much civilian pain that the governments has no choice but to yield or risk revolution. Causing revolution in the enemy to weaken it is an extremely old and effective strategy to win without fighting. The US would not likely exist without the support of the French of the American revolution against the British. Of course, the french monarchy might still be around if it did not go bankrupt funding the American revolution, thus causing its own revolution, so this strategy has its dangers.

You do not need to fight governments. You just need to make them irrelevant. As much as possible, reduce your government dependance footprint.

No comparison, I like hammermann’s the best. The only real criticism is that white text on black “burns my eyes” and is harder to read, so I’d much rather an off white font is used. The offwhite that’s under the Monero coin on the side is about the right brightness. The only caution I’d give is that although the Roadmap is cool and both new and old users want to see it, it might be best to keep it off the front page since it’s unlikely that it would be updated regularly and it might be easier to maintain on a different page (or offsite, e.g. github).