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In the Year of Hell opening. Voyager encounters a Krenim ship that opens fire on them, attempting to get them to leave. When the timeline is reset, the Krenim, although not openly friendly, tells them to leave without firing, and Captain Janeway agrees.

JANEWAY: Open a channel.

KRENIM COMMANDANT [on viewscreen]: You've entered Krenim space. State your identity.

JANEWAY: Captain Janeway of the starship Voyager. We're just passing through, trying to get home.

KRENIM COMMANDANT [on viewscreen]: This region is in dispute. I suggest you avoid our territory.

JANEWAY: Thanks for the warning.

KRENIM COMMANDANT [on viewscreen]: Good journey.

Why the different behaviour?

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  • Possible dupe of scifi.stackexchange.com/a/171339/20774. When we see the Krenim in the final scene, their 'empire' is tiny, surrounded by massively powerful enemies. There's little sense picking a fight with a random passerby if you're saving your ships and materiel to prevent bigger enemies from getting ideas.
    – Valorum
    Oct 4, 2021 at 13:22

2 Answers 2

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By the time Voyager encounters the Krenim the first time around, Annorax had spent two hundred years meddling with the timeline.

CHAKOTAY: You've been at this for two hundred years, Annorax. What makes you think you're ever going to succeed?

It's not made clear in the episode exactly when the timeline was reset to but it does seem that the time ship never got built 200 years prior.

This is why the Krenim you see after the reset is so vastly different.

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Annorax's ultimate goal was not to keep Krenim in power or restore them to it. It was to be reunited with his family.

The final scene on the time ship implies that building it was the cause of the attack by neighbors in the first place. The time ship has been erased and due to that timeline got reset to the moment from before it went operational re-aligned accordingly, giving the impression of a reset. Disappearing lock of hair means that his family was alive back then (before building time ship, that is).

It follows then that, apparently when Annorax got his wish, maybe the time weapon was not as appealing as during the first iteration. Or maybe it was that he - as is implied in the link to similar question - remembered it, and advocated against building it again. Or maybe the time ship erased itself so completely that even the scientific breakthrough that allowed it to be build was gone, too. After all, it function was to "erase something from the timeline as if it never existed".

So, when the time ship was never built, the Empire suffered the normal fall (though it's not implied anywhere), and Krenim accepted that it was the natural order of things? And unlike the first time, they weren't attacked by their neighbors in coordinated effort? If everyone is against you, it's no longer paranoia but reality, where "shoot first, ask later" is the best policy.

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