Re: And we wonder why people want to exit the EU
Big ones. Similar in size to the EU.
While the US and China are of the similar "size" (economically; that's the only size that really matters) to the EU, Russia's is not even of the same order of magnitude:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal):
Entity GDP[1012 USD]
1. USA 21.4
-. EU 18.7
2. China 14.1
3. Japan 5.2
4. Germany 3.9
5. India 2.9
6. UK 2.9
7. France 2.7
8. Italy 1.9
...
11. Russia 1.6
[IMF values; The numbers vary by the agency, but the ranking remains similar enough]
Note that the EU members Germany, UK, France, and Italy each have the economy substantially larger than Russia's; if Russians can afford to run their own GNSS system, there is obviously no overwhelming economic reason why either one of these three can't. And it's not like the Russians are even spending hand over fist on their space program: it costs about 1/4th of one percent of their GDP; to put that number in perspective, just the annual cost of implementing the Universal Credit programme is about 10% of the cost of the Russian space program; the total amount sunk into UC would be enough to run Russia's space program for the full year.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
