I'm not sure some of those cases like Severnaya Zemlya are actually "censored". These are seriously remote, uninhabited islands near the North Pole and little

I'm not sure some of those cases like Severnaya Zemlya are actually "censored". These are seriously remote, uninhabited islands near the North Pole and little else, I suspect the commercially available satellite imagery for them is just crappy (look at the pixelation for anything in Russia at those latitudes!) and there's no pressing reason to get better data. That "giant gray bar" looks like data from a satellite flyover stripe failed for some reason; if you were trying to intentionally hide something, you'd do it on the postprocessed data like the Dutch seem to be doing.