It would take them years to acquire the GPUs at the scale that they need them. By the time they do that they're 2 generations behind. It's about adding a barrier.
This doesn't sound right to me. As a back-of-the-envelop calculation how much realistically would say the Russian government need? Even if they need in the league of 10,000s annually I think it would be easy for them to source this from a handful of friendly countries in a couple of months.
For example they could set-up a couple of "mining startups" in Dubai, Egypt, Serbia or India. Then buy 1000s of GPUs under the companies name and then put them in a yacht and ship to Moscow.
You are right that the export ban for GPUs is much more likely to hurt Russia, who are nowhere near of being able to have their own GPU architecture.
China on the other hand, has already designed faster GPUs than those that are banned now for export to them, so they will not be affected. NVIDIA will be more affected by the ban than China, as they have already announced that they will have to delay the deployment of H100 until they will succeed to migrate the assembly of cards to locations outside China.
Other comments have already provided links to benchmarks comparing A100 with the Chinese Biren GPU.
I literally know people who fly into Russia with entire disassembled gaming rigs in their suitcases (and do their best to avoid customs) from Turkey, etc. I'm sure if the Russian government needed these, they'd set up an operation to let them through. Russia is not as closed off as people seem to imagine.
