How Sanctions Are Shaping Russia’s Quantum Technology Strategy 

The Soviet Theory That Never Commercialised 

Russia's (or the USSR at the time) engagement with quantum science stretches back to the 1930s, when Vladimir Fock gave the field second quantisation, the mathematical framework used to describe systems of quantum particles. Nikolay Bogolyubov laid the foundations for understanding quasi-particles that plague superconducting qubits today. The pattern repeats in the computing domain. In his 1980 book Computable and Uncomputable, the mathematician Yuri Manin observed that the classical resources needed to simulate a generic many-particle quantum system could grow exponentially with the number of particles, a year before Feynman's famous 1981 lecture on the same problem in the US. Publishing in Russian, and not being able to travel as freely as Feynman, due to Soviet authorities’ restrictions, Manin’s idea travelled less widely. Nevertheless, he inspired Alexei Kitaev, a renowned Russian mathematician, who read the book as an undergraduate and later contributed towards fault-tolerance approaches and the toric code, a quantum error-correction code, underpinning the surface code family used in quantum error correction today by Google and others. The Soviet system produced world-leading theory but rarely, if ever, converted it into commercial products however. 

More recently, President Putin’s adviser Anton Kobyakov told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2019 that Russian companies should capture at least 8% of the global quantum communications market, with exports across Southeast Asia, Latin America and the BRICS bloc, he was describing an ambition to supply rather than buy. Today, however, it has become a thought-provoking question how a sanctioned state such as Russia does indeed build quantum capability. 

A National Programme Built On Existing Infrastructure 

The 2019 roadmap under the national Digital Economy programme carried a budget of RUB 51.1 billion, roughly $790 million, including RUB 8.7 billion from private commercial partners. The budget split the field three ways: Rosatom, the state atomic energy corporation, took quantum computing; Russian Railways took communications; and Rostec, the defence technology conglomerate, took sensing. That division is often presented as evidence of sophisticated state coordination, but a more pragmatic explanation is that each pillar went to the corporation already controlling the most relevant physical infrastructure. Russian Railways, for example, brought a nationwide fibre network and railway rights of way, rather than a longstanding research pedigree in quantum photonics. The result is a mission owner model in which the funder is also the plausible first customer, removing the commercialisation risk that consumes most Western quantum capital. 

Underneath that split sits the National Quantum Laboratory pooling fragmented expertise, infrastructure and training into one consortium headed by Ruslan Yunusov, who co-founded the Russian Quantum Center, an independent research organisation dedicated to advancing quantum physics and practical applications, and now running Rosatom's quantum project office. Founding members of the consortium included a Rosatom company registered as LLC JV Kvant, alongside the National University of Science and Technology (MISiS), the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI RAS). Concentrating national capability in one structure made the programme coherent enough to direct. 

Rosatom has coordinated the computing roadmap since 2020, spending some RUB 24 billion to 2024 across approximately 20 institutes and some 600 researchers. Devices ran to eight superconducting qubits in 2023 and a computational equivalent 16-qubit trapped-ion machine earlier in the same year, before two 50-qubit processors (ions and neutral atoms) arrived in 2024. December 2025 brought the headline milestones, a 70-qubit ytterbium ion register at a reported 96.1% two-qubit fidelity (how reliably a quantum computer performs an operation), and a 72-qubit neutral rubidium processor from Moscow State University at 94%. Rosatom claims Russia is one of only three countries with prototypes on all four major platforms, although that exclusivity claim and the latest performance figures have not been independently validated. Ultimately, fidelity matters more than qubit counts: 94% fidelity on two-qubit operations implies roughly one error per every 17 operations and remains above commonly quoted fault-tolerance thresholds. The fairest assessment is competent physics at moderate scale, rather than commercially useful quantum computing. 

Sanctions As A Selection Pressure On Quantum Hardware 

The restrictions arrived in one motion on 15 September 2022, when the US Treasury authorised sanctions on anyone operating in Russia's quantum computing sector and barred US persons from supplying quantum services to individuals in Russia under Executive Orders 14024 and 14071, respectively. While in parallel, US Commerce imposed export controls on quantum hardware, software and technology. JV Kvant, one of the founding members of Russia’s National Quantum Laboratory consortium, was selected on the stated basis that it develops quantum technologies and belongs to the consortium. By bringing scattered expertise into one visible network, the programme also made it easier for sanctions authorities to identify whom to target, showing that centralisation can be both a strength and a vulnerability. 

More revealing than the milestones is which platforms Russia actually delivered on. Both 50-qubit machines were atom-based, one using trapped-ions and the other neutral atoms, despite the existence of Russian superconducting laboratories already in 2011. The choice appears to have been driven less by scientific preference than by what Russia could obtain. Superconducting qubits need dilution refrigerators, cryogenic control electronics and advanced chipmaking facilities, all inside Western export control perimeters, while ions and neutral atoms need lasers, vacuum systems, optics and fairly obtainable elements. 

Over four years the atomic platforms went from single digits to more than 70 qubits while the superconducting line moved more slowly from four to 16 in roughly three years. The portfolio therefore reads less like a purely scientific bet than a set of choices made within a constrained components catalogue. Supply chain insecurity therefore acts as a selection pressure on modality. Arguably, trapped ions and neutral atoms carry a structurally lower geopolitical fragility profile than superconducting circuits, despite carrying their own dependencies such as precision laser optics, and vacuum equipment, an argument in their favour unrelated to scientific advantages, which may have played a role in Russia’s modality advancements. 

Turning Towards The East Trades One Geopolitical Dependence For Another 

Against announced public commitments of roughly $6 billion in the United States and $5.6 billion in the United Kingdom, Russia's $790 million is relatively pale in comparison. However, in quantum communications it has been punching above its weight. In 2023, a Russian and Chinese team published an experiment demonstrating distribution of secret keys across 3,800 kilometres between Moscow and Urumqi using China’s Micius satellite, conducted the year prior. Within the private market, QRate, a quantum key distribution developer spun out from the Russian Quantum Center, has readied its fibre QKD system for national certification, though the final certification is not publicly disclosed. The evidence 

suggests that practical deployment advanced furthest in communications, even though certification and dependence on foreign components remained constraints. 

Russia has pushed its quantum diplomacy into the BRICS bloc, further accelerated by its exclusion from Western collaboration. The inaugural BRICS Quantum Technologies Forum, co-hosted by Rosatom in Moscow in June 2026, drew more than 300 participants and closed with a joint statement on continued cooperation, embodying the supplier strategy Anton Kobyakov sketched in 2019. 

The unresolved point is that the satellite link relied on China’s Micius, suggesting that technological independence from the West may ultimately become dependence on China, with Russia occupying a specialised role inside a China-centred system. 

Where Russia's Advantage Is Likely To Sit 

Russia's strongest prospective advantage lies not in the raw performance of its quantum computers but in the capacity to push quantum technology into nuclear facilities, rail networks, defence systems and secure government communications, where the mission-owner model supplies a captive first customer and deployment does not need to wait for a market. Constraint has shaped the portfolio, but it has not stopped it. The country that produced one of the pioneering arguments for quantum computation and then watched Richard Feynman’s lecture spur the global quantum computing landscape, now has to prove it can hold on to its place in the global race, and avoid suffering the same fate of relative insignificance as it has in AI.