Kharkiv was Ukraine’s science hotbed until Russia attacked. The crippled city refuses to give up. LongReads
In an SUV pockmarked by shrapnel, Mykola Shulga wends his way along the Kharkiv highway, dodging concrete barriers and antitank obstacles scattered along the road like giant toy jacks. On the northern outskirts of his broken city, he reaches the ruins of Pyatykhatky, an academic enclave set amid oak and maple groves. “This was one of the most beautiful areas of Kharkiv,” he says, on a brisk October day.
Alongside those emergency efforts, the European Union, the United States, and other allies have started discussions with Ukrainian counterparts on what a Marshall Plan for Ukrainian science might look like—if funding were to materialize. This month, the European Union is expected to approve a program in which DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator center, will spearhead an effort to map Ukraine’s science landscape, says DESY’s Martin Sandhop.
This facility, called the Neutron Source, would generate medical isotopes and beams of neutrons for probing materials. It would also serve as a prototype for subcritical nuclear power reactors that, unlike existing plants, do not sustain a chain reaction in their core. In August 2021, KIPT completed the reactor itself and a 100-megaelectronvolt accelerator that fires neutrons into the reactor to maintain fission reactions.
Until September, Valentin Chebanov, ISC’s deputy director, camped out in his office, believing it was safer than his apartment downtown. The institute also converted a vast subbasement in its main building into a shelter with cots and a cooking area. Some 200 staff and their families holed up there for months. Bracing for a rough winter, ISC is installing internet and making other improvements to the shelter.
IRA’s long-term prospects may hinge on completing a successor to UTR-2 called the Giant Ukrainian Radio Telescope . It could detect distant exoplanets in a new way, by looking for the low-frequency radio flares whipped up when planetary magnetic fields interact with those of their host stars. By 24 February, IRA had installed five of GURT’s 100 planned antenna arrays. When fully deployed, GURT would be 10 times more sensitive than UTR-2.
But the university faces financial woes. Because the central government pegs university budgets to the number of enrolled Ukrainian students, it reduced Karazin’s funding for the current academic year by 15%. Karazin also lost tuition revenue from foreign students. Forced to make painful cuts, Kaganovska, a law professor, did not renew contracts for 48 faculty members in the School of Physics , including its chair.
At least three dozen assistance programs in Europe and the United States are now throwing lifelines to scientists in Ukraine. Many are small efforts, targeted to specific disciplines. For instance, an initiative of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a large U.S. society, funded 22 Ukrainian proposals on magnetism to the tune of $180,000 this year and plans to spend another $100,000 on new projects in 2023.
She and others hope peace will open the way to an overhaul of Ukraine’s R&D enterprise. The government’s own draft recovery plan for science and education calls for setting up a genomics research center and a Ukrainian version of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funds high-risk research. The plan also calls for rebuilding Ukraine’s small oceanographic research fleet.
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