[freeflight]

This has everything to do with keeping Russian digital sovereignty intact in case "digital blockades" will become an actual thing.

Like it or not, but Facebook and Google sitting in the US, collecting massive amounts of private data from people all over the world, while the NSA just taps straight into exchanges, like the DE-CIX, means that the Internet is an inherently very hostile place to any non-Five eyes [0] actors.

It's also for those above reasons that Russia and China have massive local social media alternatives, they don't want their citizen's data to end up on US servers.

For countries like Russia and China, it's actually important to make sure their digital infrastructure doesn't fall apart the moment a US company, or those aligned with Five-Eye interests, decide to shut them out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes