siteUrl in Twig templates not working
The answer to this is that in the general.php I had a setup which somehow was giving trouble when setting siteUrl. Things were like this:

return array(
    '*' =&gt; array(
        'omitScriptNameInUrls' =&gt; true,
    ),
    'siteUrl' =&gt; array(
        'ru' =&gt; 'http://www.mysite.com/',
        'en_us' =&gt; 'http://www.mysite.com/en/'
    )
);


While seemingly correct, in this setup siteUrl should be moved into '*' block, otherwise there comes the problem that I described earlier. So the correct version is this:

return array(
    '*' =&gt; array(
        'omitScriptNameInUrls' =&gt; true,
        'siteUrl' =&gt; array(
            'ru' =&gt; 'http://www.issuesinlinguistics.ru/',
            'en_us' =&gt; 'http://www.issuesinlinguistics.ru/en/'
        )
    )
);