My experience with Russian sourced software is to treat it as low trust, like I do everywhere else, until proved otherwise. An example is gitflic.ru. I’m cautious about it but can see a number of developers moved there after being thrown of MS’s Github so a very legitimate reason to use it. Is potential Russian surveillance any worse than the government of the country in which you live? Probably not.
As others are saying, rip anything you can’t download from anywhere else otherwise just download. I’ve been through this too and ripping old VHS or DVD takes a lot more time and hassle than downloading it.
Genuine question, are Russian sites any worse or better than anywhere else these days?
In the professional world it’s called “Distributed backups” and is recommended technique for archiving. I’m doing my bit daily at no charge to the media industry, just out of the goodness of my heart :)
Looks quite possible. It does connect every time you visit a site on the bypass list but not viewing other sites.
I think your right that yes it does seem like a coordinated crack down at the moment. Almost like round 2.