VASILI Artemeyev’s English is impressive to the point that the slight lilt is almost disconcerting until explanation is offered.

“I was educated at Blackrock College from aged 15 onwards and then when I graduated from there went on to study and play in University College Dublin for another three years. I spent some time with the Leinster Academy in the meantime and then had three seasons with Northampton Saints,” the Krasny Yar Krasnoyarsk captain reveals.

In the broader interests of the sport as a whole it is opportune that his club and Russian rugby as a whole could have no better advocate at what feels like a key moment in their development following last weekend’s shock European Challenge Cup victory over holders Stade Francais.

Yes, the French giants sent a weakened team and yes, the great and the good of Continental rugby seem rather dismissive of the Challenge Cup as a whole, but it was a result that has forced people to pay a bit more attention to the team that Edinburgh will, sort of, visit this weekend.

That the Scottish side actually faces the shorter trip to the match venue offers perspective in itself, a result of what appears a slightly strange decision by their hosts to move this match to Moscow because of their fears about the weather, in spite of having made home advantage count to the full in Siberia only last weekend.

“It was always too much of a risk to plan an end-of-October fixture in Krasnoyarsk because it can get quite freezing cold, with the pitch freezing over,” Artemeyev explained. “Obviously there’s a four hour time difference between Moscow and Krasnoyarsk so we’ll have to adapt to that, but nevertheless it’s a great event for the club.”

For all that he claims they have strengths all round the pitch, the 30-year-old admits to having had rather less influence on last weekend’s outcome than his club’s pack of grizzled forwards and reckons they won because they wanted it more.

“This is obviously our debut in the competition and I suppose that no-one had really heard of our club even though our history goes back 50 years,” he said. “We knew that the only way we would be stronger than the opposition was by desire and that really paid off.”

Those comments speak to the scale of both rugby union’s opportunity and failure when it comes to moving beyond its traditional boundaries. As Artemeyev acknowledges, in noting that even in Krasnoyarsk it is below ice hockey, basketball, volleyball, football as well as the locally popular ice hockey with a ball, it will never be the leading sport in Russia, but it does not have to be. The Russian League already boasts six full-time professional teams, with six more part-time, while Krasnoyarsk alone is close to twice the size of Glasgow. and Siberia has around eight times the population of Scotland. However the Berlin Wall came down six years before rugby went open and, to this point, even less has been done to develop Russian rugby than in the sport’s relative strongholds in Romania and Georgia.

“In the list of most popular sports we’re probably sixth or seventh, so there’s still a long way to go to attract attention and this platform in the Challenge Cup really helps,” Artemeyev observed. “In the last four or five years rugby has been introduced into the curriculum for many schools in the area which has brought a lot more hope for the future of our sport in the region because we have to compete against other more popular sports.”

Should they do so successfully the possibilities represented for rugby could not be more obvious.