Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.

In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.

Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.

Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.