As for making this public we are public by default. But we are learning that anything involving countries needs to be communicated with a lot of context. Countries are a core part of people their identity.
In the future any decision involving countries will still be public but the discussion will not be.
The two are so correlated that they might as well be the same, and it strikes me as dishonest to make the distinction.
It's like saying "we don't hire people in Alabama" and "we don't hire black people".
Are those two statements equivalent?
There very well may be real reasons not to hire people in Alabama, (I'm making these up).. Onerous regulations, taxes too high, etc. Not hiring a class of people because of what they are is very different.
The whole problem at Gitlab is that nobody could articulate a concrete reason to ban people who live in Russia whereas in China they wouldn't hire them because of the Great Firewall and the block of google whose services were important to job functions.