I think there’s a decent possibility that the US is sending teams of people to all these countries to investigate what Russia may be doing to them, and teach them about how to detect and prevent Russian cyber activity against their infrastructure / journalism / military targets.

It could also be purely made of, of course, but it seems a little on the specific side, and that up there is an obvious reality-possibility which actually would make sense, which you could if you wanted to mischaracterize as the nonsense activity which RT is describing.

I assume this is about the physical connections.

It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.

It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.

Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn't find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):

Fuck Russia? That's enough of a reason for me! Plus if the Russians respond with kinetic weapons then there's suddenly justification to do 'more stuff.'

Because fuck Russia and (most of) it's people.

Even inside the motherland! Aieeee!