From Scratch, For Whom?

What the record is. The quarter's Russian flagship releases, read from primary sources: GigaChat 3.1 Ultra, an open mixture-of-experts model (~702B total parameters, ~36B active) trained from scratch on Russian data and released on Hugging Face in November 2025; and T-pro 2.0, open-weight, with a Cyrillic-dense tokenizer. Behind them stands Putin's keynote at AI Journey 2025 (Sber headquarters, 19 November 2025), which framed the whole program as a matter of state, technological and, in his phrase, values sovereignty. The verbatim passage: «Критическую зависимость от чужих систем мы не можем допустить. Для России это вопрос государственного, технологического и, я бы сказал, ценностного суверенитета.» ("We cannot permit critical dependence on others' systems. For Russia this is a question of state, technological and, I would say, values sovereignty.") In the same speech he said that in certain areas, partly public administration and partly the work of the special services and force agencies, Russia must rely exclusively on its own base developments.

The following separates the record from my reading.

The fact register. The releases are real, and saying so is the point: genuine domestic builds, not relabelled foreign weights. At AI Journey 2025 Herman Gref announced the open release, with full weights, of the flagship (GigaChat 3.1 Ultra, then in preview) and its siblings, GigaChat Lightning, the GigaAMv-3 speech model, and the Kandinsky and Kandinsky 5.0 image and video models, calling it the largest open-source project in Europe. And the benchmarks undercut the capability claim: on cost-adjusted quality the flagship Russian models lag the leading Chinese open models, and this is sourced, not asserted: Sber's own Anton Frolov, who heads its generative-AI development, treats DeepSeek openly as proof that frontier capability no longer needs a trillion-dollar budget.

The political read. The narrative around the releases is sovereignty, and the labs' "no foreign base weights" framing is the technical answer to a political instruction. When the capability claim fails, the pitch shifts ground rather than folding: in a Reuters interview ahead of the St Petersburg forum in June 2026, Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin framed the product as slower and not as smart as Anthropic, Grok, or DeepSeek, but aligned with your values, sold to states that want sovereign AI and cannot afford to build it.

The economic read. Read together, the move is rational. A losing capability position is repositioned as a values-and-residency offer, mirroring China's own Global South open-source play; Putin's keynote supplies the state-level version, an International AI Alliance now 28 organisations strong and a proposal to harmonise AI law with partners through BRICS, the SCO and the EAEU. "Sovereignty" stops being a domestic shield and becomes an export pitch. The irony underneath it is the dependency the pitch omits: Chinese chips, and DeepSeek as the template everyone copies.

What it means / what's next. For Russia-watchers: judge the program by distribution deals, not benchmarks: the product is sovereignty, and its market is states. For Global South ministries: the pitch's honest content is residency and control, not capability; the dependency it omits prices the sovereignty on offer. For the China–Russia desk: Sber's chip-sourcing is the standing item, and the narrative's silence about it is the tell. Indicators to watch: (1) any Global South state announcing a GigaChat-based national deployment within two quarters, the tripwire in Key Judgment Five; (2) whether the Russian-only-data requirement dropped from the sovereign-AI bill before its July 2026 passage returns in secondary regulation (Key Judgment Four); (3) Sber's chip-sourcing for GigaChat; (4) whether T-pro 2.0's corpus, benchmark and tokenizer work is picked up outside T-Tech: reproduction is the compliment that counts.

The standing section, on the Russia beat this time: the same discipline Issue 1 applied to Chinese state text, applied to the two registers of Russian sovereign-AI talk, the one aimed inward, and the export English aimed at everyone else.

The fact. The program speaks two scripts. Inward: Putin's AI Journey 2025 keynote (critical dependence on foreign systems "unacceptable"; a matter of state, technological and values sovereignty; own base developments only in administration and the security agencies) and the paired vocabulary written into the 8 July 2026 AI law, суверенный ИИ ("sovereign AI," fully Russian, the true "from scratch") and национальный ИИ ("national AI," Russian-controlled but permitted foreign open-source components). Outward: the June 2026 export pitch: slower, not as smart, but aligned with your values, resident on your soil.

What crosses over. The offer: sovereignty as a product. Values alignment, data residency, independence from the American stack, a capability deficit converted into a values proposition for states that cannot build their own.

What stays in Russian. The register that reveals what the product is for:

• The command register. The keynote's language of unacceptable dependence and own-base-developments-only for the security agencies, an instruction being complied with, not a market being served.
• The two-tier split. Суверенный promises fully from scratch; национальный quietly permits foreign open-source. The export pitch needs a third move (values) because neither domestic term travels.
• The dependency. Chinese chips and the DeepSeek template appear in neither script.

The read. We assess the export pitch is the domestic mandate translated into marketing. The deficit conceded abroad ("slower, not as smart") is unsayable at home, where the keynote frames sovereignty as security; and the dependency underneath is unsayable in both. Each register omits what the other requires.

The honest caveat. The two quotations doing the load-bearing work are confirmed: Putin's sovereignty passage against the Kremlin transcript of the AI Journey 2025 keynote, and Vedyakhin's concession against the Reuters interview. Its deregulatory direction is confirmed against the keynote, and the bill's passage (State Duma, 8 July 2026) and the 21-to-13 cut check out across the Russian coverage. What remains genuinely forward-looking is the export tripwire in Key Judgment Five.

Why it matters. The ministries this pitch targets will read it in English. What the Russian register adds is the pitch's function: compliance with a political instruction, repackaged for export. Reading both is the difference between evaluating a product and evaluating a promise.