They can't really "afford it" in the common sense of it. Russia is just so big and has so much left over hardware and factories from soviet days as well as people with the know how that things will get done alone almost automatically by scale and diversity of options. Somewhere there's always someone able that's willing to do it for less.

Its difficult to explain this concept/phenomenon, but Russia just works very differently compared to other countries and has a lot of underpaid skilled people, information and older tech to fallback on.