today one of things you must do to be an astronaut is to be good enough in working russian. They in turn must be passable in english. Good enough to work at a technical level in that language. The soyuz module (russian) is still the escape pod for the ISS. Which, btw, would never have existed without Mir. So we have a diverse and wide crews, europeans, russkis, americans. I may be misremembering but I think some indian astronauts have also spent time up there in the tin can. Its not really about ass being kicked I'm afraid, its about spaceflight and rocketry and satellites for comms.