The way I read the article was that all Belarussian and Russian applicants for renewals of visas / residency were rejected.

Edit: the US visa rejection rate is around 15%. This really doesn’t seem like news at all… After reading some other sources on this topic, it seems that it would have been only around 8% of applications, So yeah, seems you are correct. I stand corrected. Seems like this is barely worth an article in that case, countries reject visas all the time for arbitrary reasons…