China has its own internet firewall and Russia currently has a lot of sanctions against it so this may well be the problem. (The fact that you can get through with a VPN also indicates this)
Well, in my case I had this problem with PSRTutorial for ages, also discussed it here somewhere; I believe they blocked some IPs to protect themselves from spam. Also, not every email service receives their letters, so there can be problems with registration. I tend to believe that the reasons are within PSRTutorial, it's all technical, not personal. But getting a message about being banned can be rather misleading.