More than other civilizations, nomad states like the Mongols relied on socially customary military skills and importable goods. Unfortunately for them, the post-gunpowder Military Revolution was all about professionally trained military skills and manufactured goods.

It takes skilled engineering to lay out an effective artillery fortress. It takes trained crew to fire cannon effectively. And it takes a range of factories back home to keep those border forts stocked with powder and shot.

All those things require a government that invests steady resources into "training people and building stuff."

But training people in special skills, and building stuff, are exactly what nomad kingdoms like the Mongols generally had never had to do before.

Nomad states historically relied on the customary skills of their population to make them a military force. Every able-bodied male was a trained rider and trained archer; forming an army was about maintaining their loyalty and organization, not about training up separate professional "engineering corps" and "artillery corps."

Likewise, nomad states historically subsisted on trading with or raiding sedentary peoples to acquire prestige goods and manufactures. The goods they made themselves were the ones that didn't require permanent settlements. If you couldn't conveniently fit the workshop inside a single cart, it wasn't a good fit for Mongol culture.

Now, none of this made Mongolian leaders magically deaf to the uses of cannon, nor magically incapable of employing other, sedentary people to serve as siege-and-fortress experts. The Mongolian conquest of China, in particular, saw heavy Mongolian employment of Chinese (and Muslim) troops for siege work. And in later years the Mongolians themselves gained an increasing sedentary element, organizing around the nuclei of Buddhist monasteries.

But particularly in the west, Russia had a far more sedentary, manufacturing-friendly and professional-specialization-friendly economy and culture than the Tatars. Supporting furnaces and warehouses for cannonballs, and training engineers to build forts and crew to man them, was much closer to "ordinary government" for the Russians than for the Tatars.

For more on the Military Revolution and how it played to European advantage, see the last chapters of Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. For more on traditional nomad state culture, especially as applied to the Mongols, see the Cambridge History of China, volume 6.