No, no, there have been some crossed wires here. The claim is that deisik knows with certainty that the Russian government want to make profit (which is a fair assumption, I suppose). However, deisik doesn't know with certainty how they plan on achieving that goal, but suspects it's not going to be Bitcoin. It sounds as though deisik is saying they could conceivably allocate some of their fiat budget to investigating the possibilities and, even if nothing came of it, that research money in and of itself would still be profitable for someone (not that they necessarily are doing that research, just that they could).
Even if there were a government planning on getting involved with large-scale mining operations, which seems unlikely to begin with, announcing such a project publicly would be a likelihood even more remote. There isn't any real profit in a 51% attack, which is probably why no governments have attempted it. But someone somewhere is probably spending a boatload of money in research to learn that obvious-to-us fact the hard way.
ah thanks for the correction.
as for 51% attacking (my premise) there is not real profit, its to control and kill it. would cost scads of money but what is money to a government? just print more up to kill btc and then your fiat is safe again.
If they raise inflation rates to attack BTC it would have an impact on the economy too, and they would have to explain people about it. But yeah it's a problem, governments could spend billions in propaganda and promote their forks as well bribing everyone up, so it's not only a potential 51% government funded mining operation attack, but malicious hard forks too (I suspect all of these bigger block hardforks are promoted by certain governments)