The ruble is undervalued and the british pound is overvalued. Try buying any consumer electronics item in the UK and check the price.
Then consider the fact the UK needs to import a lot more things than Russia. It is not even self reliant in terms of food.
People joke about how Russia's electronics industry is crap, but Russia at least can design a workstation class CPU, and manufacture a chip at 90nm. The UK can do neither. Even when you consider they have ARM, try seeing which chip designs come out of ARM Cambridge, it is embedded grade crap, not workstation or server grade. All the latest high end cores designed by ARM in the last 3 years come from ARM Austin (Texas, US) and before that their unit in France.
Corruption in Russia is overrated. Good luck pushing that in their MIC. You will land your ass in jail. Talk about corruption is way more applicable in the US MIC, where projects which make no sense continue being acquired because they provide jobs in a given congressional district regardless of how good they are. This is how programs like LCS are allowed to continue. In Russia even if a project like that managed to be pushed out, they would produce one or two units at best then shitcan it.
People always try to explain how Russia can be supposedly insanely corrupt, not invest enough in its military, and yet produce loads of weapons. The answer is quite simple really. Both your initial premises are wrong. Another tired argument I still hear, is how Russia's MIC is full of old people in their late 40s. You clearly don't watch Combat Approved all that much and still think the Russian MIC is like it was two decades ago.
