A private US company, albeit one with nice government backing, is making a delivery cheaper and somewhat on time.

Russia does have a great and long positive history of successful launches and dockings but of late things are starting to look a bit sketchy for them.

Not true. Though the Russian astronauts at the time did receive pay bonuses for achieving tasks such as this, the problems during the Mir collision in 1997 were not because he was trying to earn that extra cash. The man who was controlling the Progress freighter, Vasili Tsibliev, was simply trying to do the job he had been ordered to do. This was a scheduled docking test that had been badly designed. They were testing a new docking system but did not provide Tsibliev the proper equipment to judge distances. He was expected to judge speed and distance by eye and with a handheld laser rangefinder, something that is generally considered too difficult to do in space. Moreover, the freighter was coming in from below, so that the background was the Earth, making it very difficult to see the freighter against the wash of Earth’s clouds and landforms.

The human component of the crash was that Tsibliev had been overworked for the past few months, and that he had had two past bad docking experiences, suggesting he was not the best person to do this test to begin with.

For more details, see pages 428-441 of my book, Leaving Earth: Space stations, rival superpowers, and the quest for interplanetary travel.