The title of the article is a bit misleading, as upon reading it you may came to conclusion that Russian pirate infrastructure is actively hunted by goverment. That's not really true and the article itself adds some significant nuances.
Long story short:
Piracy in Russia over last two years has greatly increased overall (in both demand and supply) due to sanctions making legal options unavailable. Number of piracy takedown requests has also increased, but only reason for that is local streaming services hunting for local content. This effectively means that it's enough for siteop to remove some Russian titles from the library (or hide them for Russian IPs) to keep operating without any significant legal problems.
So pirates worldwide are benefiting from more pirate services with more content and better speeds that their Russian fellows keep bringing them.
Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. ... Western companies have 'legalized' piracy in Russia.
100% this.
Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it's excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.
It's inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.
In today's world limiting access to content by location and government is stupid. If they would open their content worldwide, even if charging money, I bet they would get a lot more money.
Media seems to me to be one way to get a more interconnected understanding of different parts of the world. Like, theoretically, if they could perfectly prevent piracy, isolating them so they can only consume propaganda (and other media made in the bubble) does not seem to be a productive goal to me? It only serves to make them more nationalistic, an easier population to control.
Cutting them off from communicating and learning from the world is not a logical move.