Guess it didn’t work out too well for them since they had their bank accounts frozen (possibly assets seized)

There’s that funny, but sad thing about laws and how not to break them - a lot of it in daily life depends on instinct, like “how not to make your Windows 98 installation hang”. And those instincts, the aesthetics of what you should and shouldn’t do, are very different between USA and Russia.

Fraud aside.

and then proceeded to speak ill of Russia (including they don’t speak English there)

LOL. What did they expect, “traditional values” are usually less demanding in terms of knowing foreign languages.

I mean, there was some farmer guy on YouTube who actually managed to move to Russia, create a business and all, who also learned Russian on a good level, but that fact alone (learning a new language on a fluent level being an adult) shows him to be a very unusual person. And I don’t remember any “traditional values” being among his reasons.

to escape the “far leftist” and “lgbtq ideology” here in Canada

The stronger your country and civilization group are, the harder it is to see past internal discourse towards outside reality.

So I’m not surprised that Americans and Europeans might often see their daily news as the absolute truth and be hostile to people trying to tell them otherwise. As with, for example, demonized Iran (not that theocracy is good, it’s just that in foreign policy it’s a better country that Russia, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, China, …).

For such people the internal discourse is that Russia is somehow related to their political views. While in reality it’s anything but “traditional” in the American sense.