The intent of that article, "Russia is evil", is propaganda. You can rest assured that if a Russian company was working on a deanonymization project so has the west and we're probably much further ahead at it. Although big tech swears they want to protect our privacy they do not include themselves on the list of bad actors they want to protect you from, in fact they want to know your everything, it's 2019.
I don't think anyone assumes Tor, or anything online, is totally safe from big tech these days. It didn't used to matter until silicon valley based AI got involved with trying to swing your vote and show you better ads to seperate your bucks from your wallet. (Not my opinion, even Google has admitted to doing both. Idalistic intent, still wrong to actually do to people who don't all share those ideals or know it's being done).
