babelcyrillicitalictimes
\textit doesn't work in a LaTeX template for a thesis in English. Now I am writing my thesis in Russian using the same template. MWE:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\begin{document}
оценка эвапотранспирации тростника обыкновенного
\textit{(Phragmites Australis)}
\end{document}
You need to announce LaTeX the languages you intend to use (T2A is for cyrillic):
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian,french,english]{babel}
\begin{document}
In Dahl’s dictionary there is a similar sounding word “\foreignlanguage{russian}{дуван}”.
\begin{otherlanguage*}{french}
“C’est auprès de son père, écrivain de la nation pisane à la douane de Bougie, à
la fin du douzième siècle[todo], que le célèbre mathématicien Léonard
Bonacci
\end{otherlanguage*}
\end{document}
The main problem is that fonts have only 256 slots available for glyphs and writing in French and Russian requires more than 256 glyphs. (Maybe this is not strictly true, but even if the number of glyphs were less than 256, a special output encoding for French and Russian would be needed; what about German and Russian, Polish and Russian, or a mixing of three languages?)
You can always define an abbreviation, say \RUS, for typesetting isolated words in Russian
\newcommand{\RUS}[1]{\foreignlanguage{russian}{#1}}
(or, more efficiently, \newcommand{\RUS}{\foreignlanguage{russian}}). You have the benefit that hyphenation will be correct.
A different approach requires using an OpenType font that contains all the needed glyphs, but of course XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX with fontspec are required.
The problem is in the english option in \documentclass. Let's see what happens:
english is a global option, so that it's passed to every packagebabel is russian, ukrainian, english.So babel gets first the global option english and loads the language file english.ldf; then it loads russian.ldf and ukrainian.ldf but does nothing with english, because it has already read that option.
Consequence: the last loaded language is Ukrainian.
Remedies: don't put language options in \documentclass if you plan to load babel with multiple languages, or specify all languages, in the desired order, as options to \documentclass.
Best Answer
While I have no idea where your problem comes from and I’ve never needed to typeset Russian, replacing
mathptmxwithnewtxmathseems to fix it. The times tag wiki gave me the idea, and while I usually don’t typeset math (and if I did, I wouldn’t use Times),newtxmathseems to be intended as a successor formathptmx.P.S.: This also works with the configuration of your initial MWE.
P.P.S.: Someone more knowledgable in these kinds of font issues might be able to give you a solution without switching packages.