Good news and bad news, I suppose?
Consequentially I did manage to get it to work but it stopped working for other devices I had KVPN set up on.
I uninstalled, rebooted, cleared logs/saved data, shut down, powered on, installed KVPN from Kaspersky Premium directly and after a bit it connected to my email account.
It is back to displaying countries for this device and connecting successfully (hurray) but I noticed my other devices are now experiencing the same issue I had with this one before I started this endeavor so now I'll have to do the same on 4 other devices 😞