The lackluster showing of Russian universities in the most recent global rankings tables has prompted a spate of national discussion, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin even lending his support last month to a Russian ranking proposed by the rector of Moscow State University, The Moscow Times reports. Not a single Russian institution featured in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education rankings, an especially troubling outcome in a year in which “the country has been galvanized by Kremlin calls for modernization,” according to The Moscow Times. “One of the measurements that Russian scholars frequently fail to fit is the citation index because many of their articles are written in Russian and remain unknown for the majority of the global scientific community,” The Moscow Times says, adding that even many of the country’s top academics don’t consider learning English to be a priority. The article cites as an example of the poor linguistic skills prevalent in Russia the English-language version of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Web site, which was roundly mocked by online commentators after “the renowned Institute for Protein Research was mistakenly named ‘Squirrel Institute’ because the Russian word for protein, ‘belok,’ was incorrectly translated as ‘belka,’ a squirrel.”