Russian President Vladimir Putin is putting his information crackdown into a new gear. Russia’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said Friday that it plans to cut the country off from Facebook. The move amounts to a major escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to freeze its citizens’ access to independent reporting on Russia’s bloody invasion of neighboring Ukraine. In a statement, Roskomnadzor portrayed its block on Facebook as a move to improve media freedom and cited 26 cases of “discrimination” against Russian news outlets since October 2020. Last week, the Kremlin said it was parti…