Paris. A month ago “everything fell apart” for Boris, a neuroscience researcher in Paris. Like thousands of his peers, he saw his research projects collapse after cooperation with Russia was suspended over its invasion of Ukraine.
In the days following the invasion, several world-renowned scientific institutions suspended their cooperation with Russia.
Among them, the European Space Agency (ESA), the CNRS (the largest French research organization), the CERN (European organization for nuclear research) or even the MIT (prestigious American institute).
The decision to cut ties dealt a serious blow to science diplomacy, particularly in the aerospace sector, where Western powers had forged close ties with Russia since the end of the Cold War.
“The decision was painful,” Josef Aschbacher, director of ESA, whose 22 member states had just agreed to break with their Russian counterparts from Roscosmos, said last week.
science without borders
One of the first victims of the suspension of cooperation with Russia was the mission ExoMarswhich was due to take off this year from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with the help of a Russian launcher and landing structure.
A bitter fact for thousands of European and Russian scientists who had been working on the project for years, key to searching for extraterrestrial life.
The suspension of the mission was also a blow to an open global community, driven by an ideal of science without borders and which had just recovered from the covid-19 pandemic.
Along the same lines, Boris, a researcher at the National Institute for Research in Health and Medicine in France, founded a center for cognitive science in Moscow.
His students traveled to different laboratories in Europe, and he, who prefers not to give his last name, went to Russia to give lectures.
“It was a unique cross-border model in the field of neuroscience,” this American of Soviet origin, in his 50s, who lives in France, explains to AFP.
“The war is beyond us”
Overnight, ten years of work was lost. Officially, the project has not stopped, but in fact, “everything is blocked”.
Due to the sanctions, the researchers can no longer finance their work in Russia. Others are threatened because they have protested against the war or fled to Armenia and Turkey.
“We talk to each other every day via Skype or Zoom… but we are lost, the war is beyond us,” confesses Boris, devastated.
On the Russian side, isolation raises fears that the country will lose out in global scientific competition. In early March, 7,000 scientists working in Russia signed a petition against the war.
Shortly before, the mathematical community had decided that its main world congress would not be held in Saint Petersburg, as planned.
Carole Sigman, of the CNRS, also points out that the influential Russian Academy of Sciences “called for a cessation of hostilities and addressed foreign researchers to avoid the rupture of scientific relations.”
The French researcher highlights the rise in requests for visas from Russian social scientists to come to France.
“Don’t abandon them”
On the western side, professors from well-known universities such as Harvard and Cambridge urged “not to abandon” their Russian colleagues in an article published in the journal Science Thursday.
According to them, “indiscriminate persecution” would be “a serious setback for Western values, based on scientific and technological progress.”
On the contrary, several Ukrainian researchers, such as the physicist Maksym Strikha, from the Taras-Shevchenko University of kyiv, call for a “total boycott” of the Russian academic community.
But despite this, the links persist. “The wall is still permeable”, observes Denis Guthleben, scientific attaché of the CNRS history committee.
This public body suspended its new collaborations with Moscow, but maintains the activity of its international laboratories in Russian territory.
#War #crumples #scientific #work #Russia #Ukraine