Just to make sure I'm not misunderstanding, you looked at the traceroute from where you are to places in Ukraine - not from there to your location? BGP doesn't have to be symmetrical, nor does OSPF or RIP. It could be as simple as a server in Moscow advertising that it can get anywhere in the occupied territories in one hop. Back in the 80s, a misconfigured router took the entire Internet down as it was advertising that it could get anywhere in one hop - and the expectable chaos ensued.

BTW, I found a page detailing VPNs that offered origination points in Ukraine but I’m not sure any of them are in occupied Ukraine.