One of the first things you want to be curious about an unknown country is its weather. Especially, it is applicable to Russia because there are so many stereotypes around that Russia is a synonymous of cold. This is not true -- the country is large, there are different climates, meteorological conditions, etc. Keeping thing in mind, you are welcome to access weather information from the Russian Space Research Institute.
In addition to this, I find it a bit fascinating, below, you can see how the Sun illuminates the country.
The groups you are seeing here could not be very conventional but it will help you to figure thing out, anyway.