A lot of them, yes - I work with a number of ethnically Russian engineers who probably would've gone into military hardware had they not emigrated to the U.S. In a company founded by someone whose parents were mathematicians who fled the then-moribund Soviet Union, no less. Bunch of my favorite computer games are written by programmers from former Soviet-bloc countries who now can make a lot more money writing projectile physics for computer games than guidance systems for actual projectiles.

Definitely not. It’s a total coincidence that the F-35 VTOL system is very similar to the innovative Soviet one used on the Yak-141 …