My VPN sometimes just goes down. There's a little icon in the tray that turns from green to red. I could set my system to not allow internet access without the VPN but that mucks about with the boot process and I'm not running spycraft.
I'm sure GRU possesses the technical chops to put in place safeguards to guarantee against ever connecting other than through the VPN. They should do that and then hire Kaspersky to come over and audit their setup.
What I do is that I have a firewall always set up so that all connections are blocked, except connections to the one VPN IP entry point that I'm using. When VPN connection goes down, my internet goes down.
Coincidentally, this also solves the problem of DNS leaks.
I feel like these things are made to be found. They undermine our election process and democracy.