Details. Perhaps you two forget that those banned accounts probably existed before said international sanctions and they lost all purchases, even the ones that were legal at the time they were made.
I'm not talking about the sanctions at all. In my opinion, and even according to the article, the thing is about banning users who use VPNs to defeat geofencing, and region pricing. This was, at most, tolerated by Steam. I personally wouldn't mind if they banned more, but I'm not Steam, I don't know how to run such a large service. I'm sure there are many nuances.
The other thing is that there is no source cited at all, and no ban type specified at all. To me, banning means that a user can no longer log in. But Steam actually applies a wide range of restrictions to an account: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...
The "20.000 ban" issue is further discussed on Reddit, where it's labeled as "misleading".
Also, I'd like to emphasize my original argument. The risk itself comes from trusting a service, and furthermore, from consciously violating the terms of service. And using VPNs to make Steam behave different is against the terms of service. Information can be found here, when searching for "proxy":
