I think each country has to decide for themselves what they're going to do about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Especially those countries who have been on the receiving end of US unilateralism as described in the article.
Despite all the past offenses of the US and the west, in this instance I think the west is acting as a force for good. Ukraine was invaded by Russia under false pretenses of "denazification" . The Ukrainians are asking for help to resist an invader. We should help them.
I think it boils down to your threat model and who you trust eh? I trust Mullvad way more than I trust Comcast. The problem with not trusting anyone, including companies like Mullvad is that you've soon backed yourself into this weird corner where you have to become a C developer so you can review the code of your Linux distro and building your own routers with pfsense. Oh, don't forget to review that code too. And how can you trust that your computer firmware doesn't have some built in back doors or tracking features enabled? Before long, you're living in a cabin without electricity, sending people letters with pen and paper... which sounds kind of nice.
Oh, here is a better post about VPNs: You want Tor Browser ... not a VPN.