I do wonder how much of that new Russian small arms cartridge is along the same lines of the SU-57 and Armata: "we have to do something to look innovative and keeping up with the West". They make a big fuss about it and produce some prototypes. And in the end, they really do fuck all but to modernize their Soviet era designs, because they can't put those things into mass production. So like
@AGPinochet said, AK-12M2 in 5.45
Though if they really wanted to, the small arms upgrade would actually be doable, because it doesn't require Western components and even the Russians can't fuck that up, they do know how to make guns.
I mean, really the best thing you can say about the majority of Russian weapons and equipment is "It works...much of the time." The radar cross section of the Su-57 is...I mean, it's nowhere near as stealthy as American designs. I think even the Chinese J-20 is stealthier, and it's likewise nowhere near as good as the F-22 and F-35. There was an airshow in China not too long ago where the Russians were invited to bring their aircraft to show off, and it was discovered the panels on the Su-57 were attached with fucking wood screws. Like, literal Phillips head wood screws. And there were large, uneven gaps between the panels all over the fuselage.
And then there's their "world leading" S-400 air defense system, the one that for years they claimed could not just detect Western stealth aircraft, but also lock on and shoot them down. Well, turns out that was a lie and they can't even detect small drones which have a much higher radar signature than an F-35.
They can come up with some interesting designs at times, like the An-94 or those new LMGs where the belt feed mechanism is all self-contained in quick change ammo boxes, but they never seem to go anywhere and they always end up iterating on the Kalashnikov and other Soviet designs that date back to damn near World War II.
And with the staggering amount of corruption everywhere in Russia from Putin himself, to the MIC contractors, all the way down to the lowest ranked soldiers, I just don't see Russia modernizing to a comparable level as Western militaries. Pretty much every Western military views optics on rifles as standard issue now, but in the Russian military it's still very uncommon to see infantry with optics on their rifles. It's still iron sights for the most part, unless the soldier bought the optic himself (and his body armor, and decent boots and gear, and batteries, and food, and...). They'll roll out the occasional vanity project that they'll hype up as beating anything the West has, build ten or fifteen of them that will still essentially be prototypes and not full production models, parade them around for propaganda purposes, and they'll live their entire lives on some military base somewhere deep in Russia and far away from the battlefield for fear of losing a single one to enemy fire. And when the West does finally get to analyze one with our sensor systems, get our hands on some wreckage, or a defector steals one to bring to the West like the MiG-25, we inevitably find out it's far less capable and of much poorer quality than our stuff and it's all been hype and propaganda the entire time.
