Russia's attempts to develop its own import substitution programme have suffered another setback. As a result of its war against Ukraine and severe international isolation, Russian businesses have found themselves facing a widening technological gap. The country lacks both modern domestically produced equipment and viable alternatives to Western software.
To keep their systems operational, Russian companies are being forced to spend enormous sums on IT services purchased abroad. Expenditure on these services rose by almost a third in the second quarter of 2026 alone, reaching 75 billion roubles.
The main reason for Russia's technological difficulties is an acute shortage of hardware, caused by the disruption of parallel import channels. While Russia previously attempted to import servers and high-performance graphics processing units through unofficial supply networks, these deliveries have now virtually stopped. Instead of thousands of units, only isolated pieces of equipment are reaching the country.
Unable to purchase the hardware needed to train artificial intelligence models and maintain databases, Russian businesses are increasingly forced to rent computing capacity from foreign cloud service providers.
The situation is further aggravated by the Russian software market's inability to offer competitive alternatives to Western products. Russian software cannot adequately replace foreign enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, industrial automation software or sophisticated engineering applications.
Russia lacks the resources, time and specialists required to develop domestic equivalents. As a result, companies continue to purchase foreign software licences through semi-legal arrangements and access overseas AI services through intermediaries in third countries, paying substantial additional fees.
The technological gap between Russia and the developed world has become increasingly difficult to bridge and continues to widen rapidly.
Dependence on foreign technological infrastructure, combined with the Kremlin's plans to impose further restrictions on incoming internet traffic, threatens to isolate Russia even further from global technological progress and accelerate its long-term technological decline.
