After hundreds of deaths of protesters at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria, the U.S. “will impose sanctions on Syrian President Bashar Assad for human rights abuses on Wednesday,” Reuters reports. Although the report calls this a “dramatic escalation of US pressure on Damascus to cease its brutal crackdown on protesters,” it must be noted that doing anything above what the U.S. was doing — which was itself nothing — is a “dramatic escalation of US pressure.”

The details are just emerging, but it appears that Assad himself will be targeted, in an apparent attempt to save the Syrian people from the consequences of sanctions: