Throughout the cold war, the Russians/USSR had to obtain/steal books and scientific articles from the US and its allies to keep up. This probably created the culture that copyright doesn't matter. Plus communism is about sharing with your community.
It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.
There is an amazing amount of nonsense posted on this thread. I cannot speak for all areas of science, but at least in math and physics the paper copies of most Western research journals were available in central public libraries. That flow of information was bidirectional as works published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were translated and published in the US and Europe. There was a considerable effort to translate English language books into Russian and publish them. I cannot vouch for all the publishers, but I know for a fact that at least MIR publisher paid royalties on sales of translated books, although I am sure they did extra printing press runs off the books, so to speak.
These days, at least before the war started... c'mon, you can't be serious.
>Plus communism is about sharing with your community.
Adding on to this, my impression of Russian culture, observing both historically and today, is that Might Makes Right(tm) is a core tenet.
That is to say, if you can do it and get away with it you are justice. The two mentioned in the article clearly are (were) getting away with it, so as far as they are concerned they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Russians don't care about ink on paper unless it can literally pickup an AK-47 and shoot them.
It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.