@alx I'd love to know where you got the notion that there aren't competent engineers in Russia. How do you think Russia was able to develop things like hypersonic weapons ahead of US exactly?

Russia also consistently tops programming competitions https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-us-has-lost-to-russia-in-these-top-coding-trials-for-almost-a-decade/

And it's the only country that managed to produce platforms like Yandex, VK, and Telegram that outcompeted US equivalents domestically.