I don’t want to appear patronising but please try and avoid viewing Russian society by the standards we hold here. Crackdowns, restrictions, murder, imprisonment these are what makes the system tick.
This latest restriction is standard practice and nothing out of the ordinary
You're doing that thing again where your baseline assumptions (upon which your arguments are based) are being delivered as though they're facts, when really they're pure conjecture.
I have friends who I work with who are currently at home visiting relatives (or have literally just come back) in St Petersberg and Novosibirsk, who both noted that the Kremlin haven't been able to control this narrative as well as they have others in the past.
One of them said that against a backdrop of economic turmoil after unprecedented sanctions, we can't assume anything when it comes to this ending in a potential regime change at some point in the near-medium term; their justification being that it's a lot easier to quell discontent when people are at least fed with a minimum quality of life guaranteed, but as others have alluded to in the thread, when a society can no longer envision a future better than the present, the pressure of the dam can eventually break.
tl;dr - there's no need to be absolutist about things that are not absolute
