For whatever reason, not many people speak English in Russia, especially outside of big cities. They have a completely different view of world affairs and the w

For whatever reason, not many people speak English in Russia, especially outside of big cities. They have a completely different view of world affairs and the world situation from you, since the only information they can digest is from their own controlled/manipulated sources and most people have no way to detect any falsehoods - it's not like they could just read Reuters/NY Times. I'm originally from a very small, insignificant country that also uses Cyrillic but people adapted to the early days of the internet just fine. English was relatively widely taught and at least understood on some very basic level, and people adapted the Latin alphabet to type out words, there's even a "phonetic" standard for using the Latin alphabet to write Cyrillic. Most of my friends from that era never even used the (poorly) localized early Windows/DOS, it was all the US version of everything. So Facebook for example is still the thing, and very well localized, although there are (for whatever ungodly reason) "local" versions of sites like YouTube (although YouTube is also super popular).