About the downvotes, I'd image some people conflate "anything Russia" with the war.

About communities for practicing, can't help much on that, maybe follow Russian-specific hashtags from Mastodon too? They can even work on RSS so you don't need to have an account, e.g. (from Japanese since I know near 0 Russian to even begin looking) https://mastodon.social/tags/今月描いた絵を晒そう.rss, where .rss is the part to make a tag a RSS feed.

There's also !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz which although more generalist, Russian learning is within its scope, with no rules I can see against.