Steam server list - are russian IPs blocked from playing on non russian servers?

Leading this with the question in the subject. a russian friend of mine is unable to join our NA (gmod) server through steam, but has no issues accessing anything else on the same IP outside of steam. has steam recently blocked russians from connecting to most servers outside of russia? referring to the comments under >>>3r0d47682 - @Glesas⁴² mentioned using a serbian server as a proxy. are serbian servers still reachable?