Deliberately reducing the number of platforms that are accessible from the outside world is what gives the regime MORE leverage, not less. If you take Russians

Deliberately reducing the number of platforms that are accessible from the outside world is what gives the regime MORE leverage, not less. If you take Russians offline, you're just submerging them into state-run TV. If you let them stay on VKontakte, you let them have more exposure to covert American media campaigns. In the cold war, a huge source of information for people east of the Berlin wall was Radio Free Europe, which was a covert media campaign. Russians do not have access to just switch to other platforms on a whim the way you seem to think they do. Banning VKontakte from the app store is not going to encourage them to move to a platform like Facebook in a country where people disappear when they circumvent the country's blocks on foreign social media. It's much more analogous to destroying the radios of the Eastern Europeans during the cold war so they can't access any outside news at all.