It is widely recognised that public interest in environmental issues is a driver of low-carbon economic development, owing to the fact that the degree of community concern about environmental quality is tightly associated with the implementation of green initiatives by business and government. In its turn, public support for environmental protection is a function of socio-economic, cultural, historical and political conditions. Russia is an economy that has managed to increase its prosperity and qualitatively transform institutions over the past two decades. The country’s economic growth has been accompanied by environmental degradation, especially at the regional level. More importantly, social and economic upswing in Russia was associated with greater involvement of the population in environmental protection issues. There has been a steady increase in the share of the population who prefer environmental protection to economic growth, and the proportion of Russians who are convinced that human activity has a significant impact on the environment has considerably grown. However, at the current stage of development, sociological surveys indicate a significant decrease in the interest of Russian citizens in environmental issues. Escalating geopolitical uncertainty and macroeconomic turbulence may contribute to the fact. This study aims to identify the determinants of the Russian population’s attitudes towards environmental issues over the period of 1995–2023, with a special focus on the role of geopolitical tensions. The results obtained by means of the sophisticated econometric techniques – Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Non-Linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) – indicate that income level, education, as well as the spread of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT) stimulate the involvement of Russian citizens in environmental issues, while geopolitical tensions reduce the share of the population that prioritises environmental protection. At the same time, the study sheds light on the fact that maintaining the interest of the Russian population towards environmental issues is most relevant in the context of high geopolitical risks, as environmental degradation is most likely to be observed during this period.
