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An unusually warm Russian December was what woke Dasha the bear, The Washington Post reports. 

Balmy temperatures melted the snow at the Bolsherechensky Zoo in the Omsk region, 1,700 miles east of Moscow, and interrupted hibernation for the brown bears.

“They probably decided that spring had come,” zoo spokeswoman Natalya Bolotova said.

After burrowing out of their hay beds, most ate a meal and went back to sleep — except for Dasha, a Himalayan. It didn’t get comfortably cool enough for her until Thursday.

Russians across the country can sympathize.

The nation is experiencing a winter heat wave that is such a hot-button issue that it was the first question posed to President Vladimir Putin during his four-plus-hour end-of-year news conference Thursday. A day earlier, Russia’s Hydrometeorological Research Center recorded Moscow’s warmest December temperature in 133 years (5.6 degrees Celsius, or 42 degrees Fahrenheit). The European part of Russia is experiencing weather that’s 5 to 8 degrees Celsius warmer than the norm for late December.

Putin responded that “nobody knows” the origins of global warming, but he acknowledged that it’s a serious issue and that Russia “must undertake maximum efforts to ensure that the climate does not change dramatically.”