Makes you wonder, this action by Putin. I wonder if they'll secretly set up huge mining farms using renewable energy. They’ll keep it all under the radar in preparation for the next bull run & onwards. If Putin is on board it means Russia will be big players in the future of bitcoin.
I think that there had been a decent amount of concern that Russia had been getting some amount of pressure to go along with China's seeming approach to the matter, and of course, having a decent amount of variance from China does tend to show that Russia is thinking about the bitcoin and mining matter differently from China - even though both of those countries have a pretty long and strong track record of flip flopping on the topic of bitcoin in strong and seemingly ongoing contradictory ways...
Some variation of the Byzantine general's problem playing out in front of us, no?... there is a certain amount of inability to trust various adversaries... but then even when the adversaries engage in various maneuvers to cheat, they might end up hurting themselves, but they do not really hurt bitcoin in any kind of meaningful or substantial way. Bitcoin chugs along and kind of expects the various players to engage in maneuvers that are hostile and contradictory to other players.. and in the end.. each player has to choose whether to play or to sit it out.. and in this case, the opposite of Wargames, the ONLY winning move is actually to play, if you choose not to play, you are going to find yourself in a much worse place 4-10 years down the road (even if you might not be able to recognize your worser position while you are developing it by not playing).