Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
> This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong.
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
>Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
Ah yes, the reason the US is years behind most other country's payments systems is because they have too much freedom.
What do you mean by modern technology? Surely not the software. Russian engineering culture is strong and their IT strategy is far ahead of what you can find in Europe. I doubt it’s easy to hack into their systems - this breach illustrates it quite well, actually (it’s rare and required focused effort).
Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
You can help instead of waiting for politicians to "do something about it". It's not that hard to find a reputable organization that helps Ukraine and send it some money.
> In 2024, charitable giving in the US was $592 billion. $392 billion of that was from individual donations.
That's a single-digit percentage of the US Federal budget.
Some of that goes to "family foundation" sinecures. Some of it goes to 10% church tithes. Quite a bit of it is spent on… raising funds. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-giving-to-charity-ask-wher... - "Of the more than $1.3 billion raised by charities in the [New York] in 2018, about $369 million — or 27% — went to pay professional fundraisers' fees")
> If 1% of our donations went to Ukraine, that's not a number to casually dismiss.
I think that's wildly optimistic, but that'd be somewhere between $3-5B. The US alone has earmarked something like $200B thus far. The EU has given a similar amount.
Every bit undoubtedly counts, but a single Patriot battery costs $1B.
I would be surprised if they could manage to keep refilling their squirt guns and deal with all the logistics required to keep an army available to use them
To be fair, it is quite difficult to support a regime where random people are grabbed off the streets and sent to their deaths. Where for expressing oppositional opinions your male relatives will have their door kicked down and will be sent to an assault on enemy position with a 90% mortality rate. And if they survive that - to another one just like it. To support a regime that has no long-term plan and goals for waging a senseless war and which openly promises to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the reclaimed territories.
So the support from Western countries is enormous, considering all these aspects.
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine, but let's be honest
People aren't being dragged off the streets in Russia. This was briefly true in mid-late 2022 when they flirted with a partial mobilization, but hasn't been true for a while.
This is (sadly) actually more true in Ukraine. But there's also some nuance there - they can stop and question but supposedly they technically can't use physical force anymore.
What Russia is doing is increasing the bonuses and salary for signing a contract. And they don't have manpower problems for the most part - Ukraine is the one having that problem.
Now the Russian military is doing alot of shady shit, like promising recruits they won't be sent to Ukraine or would serve only in rear areas (even the US military recruiters were frequently guilty of this tactic). Classifying certain infantry units as "disposable" (especially foreign recruits and those from less politically unimportant regions), basically to be used as bait in assaults. And I'm sure the pressure for the required conscripts every year to sign a regular contract so they can be deployed is quite great, but its nothing like what some would have us believe.
