Post-Cold War bridge-building through science is unraveling as Western nations seek to punish and isolate the Kremlin by drying up support for scientific programs involving Russia.
The costs of this decoupling, scientists say, could be high on both sides. Tackling climate change and other problems will be tougher without collaboration and time will be lost. Russian and Western scientists have become dependent on each other’s expertise as they have worked together on conundrums from unlocking the power of atoms to firing probes into space. Picking apart the dense web of relationships will be complicated.
International indignation and sanctions on Russia are making formal collaborations difficult or impossible. Scientists who became friends are staying in touch informally but plugs are being pulled on their projects big and small. The European Union is freezing Russian entities out of its main 95 billion euro fund for research, suspending payments and saying they’ll get no new contracts. In Germany, Britain and elsewhere, funding and support is also being withdrawn for projects involving Russia.
Russian scientists are bracing for painful isolation. An online petition by Russian scientists and scientific workers opposed to the war says it now has more than 8,000 signatories. They warn that by invading Ukraine, Russia has turned itself into a pariah state, which “means that we can’t normally do our work as scientists, because conducting research is impossible without full-fledged cooperation with foreign colleagues.
On some major collaborations, the future isn’t clear. Work continues on the 35-nation ITER fusion-energy project in southern France, with Russia still among seven founders sharing costs and results from the experiment. In other fields as well, scientists say Russian expertise will be missed. Adrian Muxworthy, a professor at London’s Imperial College, says that in his research of the Earth’s magnetic field, Russian-made instruments “can do types of measurements that other commercial instruments made in the West can’t do.” Muxworthy is no longer expecting delivery from Russia of 250 million-year-old Siberian rocks that he had planned to study.
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