Maybe I missed something, but this news seems to be based on speculation that something happened, although I don't see any concrete evidence that the two countries made any BTC transaction. This would actually make very little sense given that there are cryptocurrencies that have far better privacy than BTC and where transactions are not public, and therefore cannot be subject to any censorship or blacklisting of addresses.
In addition, why would two countries even choose a decentralized cryptocurrency when they can do so by paying in their national currencies, given that there are no Chinese sanctions against Russia and vice versa?