You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.

> To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness.

It does, but again you can pronounce all words letter for letter, and although it may sound a bit strange it'll be valid Russian.

Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.

Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.

One implicit rule of Russian is that if you pronounce each word phonetically, it is never wrong (unless you put the stress wrong).

And indeed, when publicly speaking or announcing via speakers in e.g. airport, words are pronounced almost phonetically.

Compare that to English where pronouncing phonetically is impossible and also rather undesirable.

But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)

http://zompist.com/spell.html

The first step in trying to pronounce an English word is to subconsciously guess its language of origin.