The Technological Gap Between russia And The Civilized World Has Become Insurmountable

The aggressor’s attempts to create its own “import substitution” have suffered yet another failure. Due to the war unleashed against Ukraine and severe international isolation, russian businesses find themselves in a technological abyss: the country has neither its own modern equipment nor fully-fledged equivalents to Western software. To keep their systems running in any way possible, russian companies are forced to spend colossal sums on purchasing IT services abroad. Expenditures on this rose by nearly a third in the second quarter of 2026 alone – to 75 billion rubles.

The main reason for this technological helplessness is an acute shortage of physical hardware, resulting from the blocking of parallel import channels. While russia previously attempted to import servers and high-performance graphics accelerators through gray-market channels, these shipments are now practically nonexistent – instead of thousands of units, only a handful make their way into the country. Unable to purchase its own hardware for training artificial intelligence and maintaining databases, russian businesses are forced to lease computing power from foreign cloud services.

The situation is exacerbated by the russian software market’s complete inability to offer a high-quality alternative to Western products. russian software is incapable of replacing foreign enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, industrial automation software, and complex engineering software. russia has neither the resources, nor time, let alone specialists to develop its own equivalents, so companies continue to purchase foreign licenses semi-legally and use foreign neural networks through intermediaries in third countries, paying exorbitant markups for the privilege.

The technological gap between russia and the civilized world has become insurmountable and continues to widen rapidly. Complete dependence on foreign infrastructure, combined with the kremlin’s intentions to further restrict incoming internet traffic, is definitively cutting the country off from global progress and dooming it to long-term decline.