Which assumptions were weak? I'm not sure what the comment has to do with the US, but the Russophone world is well aware of the importance of this problem to the effect that one would expect news of any consensus on the validity of this approach to percolate to the Anglophone world almost immediately. My Russian is pretty terrible, but my math is decent enough, and the article spends at least the first 12 pages motivating the problem and defining standard notions that any undergraduate should be familiar with. This is another red flag.