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In the past I managed to sign up for mail.co.uk and mail.fr, but it's long ago since I last checked these accounts, so they may be gone by now. I refrained from GMX and web.de despite hearing a lot of good feedback exactly because of these reasons: they required a German IP to sign up and even though I could have signed up when visiting Germany I didn't feel like it was worth the hassle and the worries of maybe losing the accounts afterwards. Continuity is a big deal for me.
Hence, for free email, I'd restrict myself to international services like Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo, and to local (= Belgian) providers like mail.be.
You cannot compare Protonmail or Fastmail or Runbox to free providers like Jeff mentioned. Proton, Fastmail and Runbox are paid email services, so the logic is that they will accept customers from everywhere as long as they pay the bills. Proton does have free accounts too, but given their mission of providing privacy-sensitive email to anyone it is only logical that they provide their services to users outside of Switzerland too (and they have their paid accounts to keep their services going).
I wouldn't touch mail.ru or yandex.ru with a long pole as long as the situation in Russia doesn't change. Despite good comments about the services themselves, I don't feel like a lot of hassle or rejected emails simply because of the ccTLD.
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