smugRT got banned in EU post invasion as did all the TV stations. If you care enough you can still watch it via some stream. 99% don't know what a yandex/VK is which is why they don't bother, but they have heard of telegram so there is policing there.
It also goes both ways where (some) Russians are afraid of the gov spying of them cause they could go to jail, but also don't trust the US, so instead of using secure Whatsapp which has E2E encryption enabled, they use telegram instead because it's Russian, even though majority of the time it's not encrypted.
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