Couldn't they use frontier open-weight models from Chinese labs? The current Chinese government is friendly to them.
Russia is running out of refined oil to power their economy. They probably aren't capable of spinning up datacenters to run those.
Did you skip the last paragraph? Not a great time to be building data centers in Russia. Models are nothing without computers to run them
I appreciate this line of questioning. It's really interesting to see how many excuses people need to reach for to avoid the conclusion that the "secret unheard of power" is B.S...