Is it me or it became impossible to activate russian gift copies?

read again

Might be possible, yeah, since even when purchasing games from another country you STILL have to buy from the store your billing address is in. I was visiting USA for 3 months and wanted to buy games while there, I could not use the American site because my billing address was not USA. Instead they gave me a link that redirects me to Canadian Steam and had to use that (so no American prices for me. Not that I'd want that atm...)

So perhaps they save the country of your billing address and use that as a reference point for your actual country of origin?

did they change it recently? because it surely was not like it was working few weeks ago ;p