  The basic goal of survivable network design is to construct low-cost networks
which preserve a sufficient level of connectivity despite the failure or
removal of a few nodes or edges. One of the most basic problems in this area is
the $2$-Edge-Connected Spanning Subgraph problem (2-ECSS): given an undirected
graph $G$, find a $2$-edge-connected spanning subgraph $H$ of $G$ with the
minimum number of edges (in particular, $H$ remains connected after the removal
of one arbitrary edge).
  2-ECSS is NP-hard and the best-known (polynomial-time) approximation factor
for this problem is $4/3$. Interestingly, this factor was achieved with
drastically different techniques by [Hunkenschr{\"o}der, Vempala and Vetta
'00,'19] and [Seb{\"o} and Vygen, '14]. In this paper we present an improved
$\frac{118}{89}+\epsilon<1.326$ approximation for 2-ECSS.
  The key ingredient in our approach (which might also be helpful in future
work) is a reduction to a special type of structured graphs: our reduction
preserves approximation factors up to $6/5$. While reducing to
2-vertex-connected graphs is trivial (and heavily used in prior work), our
structured graphs are "almost" 3-vertex-connected: more precisely, given any
2-vertex-cut $\{u,v\}$ of a structured graph $G=(V,E)$, $G[V\setminus \{u,v\}]$
has exactly 2 connected components, one of which contains exactly one node of
degree $2$ in $G$.
