The great irony of this is that Russia doesn't really have much use for extra human capital other than stroking the ego of its nationalists with memetic "pop number goes up" (no better than western immigration lobbyists btw). It's bad at utilizing human capital, its system of government makes fixing that near impossible, and as such it's economy is highly resource based. Frankly the leaders probably care more about the land under the human capital than the human capital itself. After all that means more land for cronies to manage, some of it may even have resources to add to the resource economy, cronies are made happy, power of the great leader is solidified.
It's a big struggle for Russia to get sane governance due to its resource curse combines with de facto land colonialism, which deceptively allows one to hide the "modern colonialism problems" that have led Spain, France and UK to shed vast majority of their huge empires - as contrary to what SJWs think, all these lands weren't making them rich, on the contrary, somewhere around the industrial age they became a drain on the treasury that they could no longer afford.
But with overseas colonies, it's easy to see them as separate, draw a line, count their incomes and expenses separately, and write them off if needed.
With land-continuous empires, it's nowhere near that easy, and on top of that, there is the resource issue. So to force the central government to run the economy and supporting services in a way that would create world competitive industries and services so that it can fund itself, they would need to be forced into such need by losing the resource income stream... But that's their
current main source of government revenue, while doing such a massive economic turnaround would require truly mind blowing amounts of money. And to hold all these more and less exotic lands with their resources, they also need to keep the locals down to keep the resources flowing and cheap... And liberal, democratic governments are not well suited to do that. But if they won't, they won't have much money to do anything at all, including the basics.
The comparison to Iran is quite spot on, while Iraq and Saudi Arabia peek right from behind it. "Resource curse" driven economies create very perverse incentives to the ruling class it seems, and unless it was created and cultured to resist such well before the big resource income became available (Norway), it doesn't seem many countries are good at avoiding this trap.
