Yes, with a residential/mobile proxy. Russian proxies are cheap because they're blocked or heavily scrutinized by many interesting networks, due to the rampant and unpunished misbehavior of some people in Russia.

Would it make any sense at all for a government agency (DOGE) to buy shady residential proxies in order to log in to their super-admin accounts? No. Nearly every government bans foreign IP addresses from accessing internal systems. That leaves the question: why did that log-in attempt happen? There may be another explanation, but the only thing that comes to mind is that someone in Russia using a mobile internet connection tried to log in but forgot to enable his VPN before doing so.

I don't see a legitimate reason to require no logging either. If you're investigating things, you want your activities logged in a way you can't alter because it demonstrates how you found the evidence, and that you aren't just making things up.

Why would a representative of a US government agency use a Russian VPN with legitimate, freshly created login credentials? I'm confident this is against all the cybersecurity rules in place.

I also don't understand why the HN comment section is full of people trying to make excuses or explanations.

Because it didn't happen?

The IP is mentioned in the article. It belongs to a cell provider. Technically possible to have a VPN endpoint on a cell network, but unlikely.