I really doing think 'virtue signaling' is the right term here - The NYT coverage of this explicitly states that Cogent was motivated by a significant increase

I really doing think 'virtue signaling' is the right term here - The NYT coverage of this explicitly states that Cogent was motivated by a significant increase in bot traffic coming out of Russia, and they basically said 'we don't want to support Russia's cyber-attacks'. They aren't trying to overthrow the government in Russia. This is meant to prevent them from waging cyber war using Cogent's infrastructure, and Cogent was a significant carrier of Russian internet traffic. It's both expensive for Cogent to do this, and significantly impacts Russia.