Media

Which raises the question of how and why. Are they bribing the people who directly run these sites to let them do this? Are they threatening financially costly hacking attacks if they're blocked?

Or was it just that some corporate accountant told them that the possibility of such attacks, and the potential cost of preventing them, meant it wasn't worth doing so?

I'd ask them directly, but I doubt they'd respond - and of course whenever I ask publicly on these news sites, the comments are removed within minutes or seconds while the "Heil Putin" chorus continues uninterrupted.