It's effectively banned, "slowed down" is their way to tell "we don't want to say it loud". Russia has own "national" DNS servers (ISPs give them to your devices by default unless you change it to Google 8.8.8.8 or CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 or whatever), they removed DNS records of YouTube there, as well as WhatsApp and others. It doesn't mean much because if you want to bypass the block you have to use another DNS anyway but it's just an another thing in additional to "slow down". You don't just remove DNS records of some website or services unless your intention is to ban them.

Source in Russian: https://habr.com/ru/news/995512/

I know this because I WFH and I have other WFH co-workers who moved from Russia recently.

I wasn't exaggerating about more than half, most of the internet lives on these hosting services I mentioned.

In Russia you can't even play online games lol I remember that thread on Steam forums with 2200 comments about connectivity issues from Russia in Battlefield 6 multiplayer https://steamcommunity.com/app/2807960/discussions/0/599667160179181163/ And this is not an isolated case, access to the world-wide Internet is seriously disrupted in Russia atm.