PHOTO: GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS942 4 MARCH 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6584 science.org SCIENCEO
n 24 February, as Russian troops
poured across the border in an un-
provoked invasion of Ukraine, Sergei
Mosyakin, director of the Institute
of Botany in Kyiv, set out with a few
key staff to secure the institute and
its National Herbarium, which holds more
than 2 million specimens representing the
wealth of Ukraine’s floral and fungal diver-
sity. Several kilometers to the south, Fedor
Danevich and six colleagues at the Insti-
tute for Nuclear Research had joined an
online workshop for a multinational phys-
ics project in South Korea. The Zoom call
included Russian physicists. “One said that
he is sorry for the war,” Danevich recalls.
The other Russians kept silent.
In the weeks leading up to the invasion,
many Ukrainian scientists had dismissed
Russia’s military buildup on their border as
bluster. Now, their lives have been turned
upside down as they make fateful decisions
about whether to dig in or flee to other Eu-
ropean nations that have stepped up to offer
accommodations and job prospects.
As Russian forces bombarded and sought
to encircle Kyiv, Mosyakin and some fellowbotanists hunkered down at home, while oth-
ers took refuge with relatives in the country-
side. Danevich says he intended to stay in
Kyiv, but his son persuaded him to gather
vulnerable family members and seek shelter
in Budapest, Hungary. As Science went to
press, they had made it as far as Romania.
Condemnation of the invasion has rained
down on Russia from many quarters, and a
rising chorus is calling on the West to sever
ties with Russian scientists. “I’m sitting now
with my 86-year-old mother, who is a promi-
nent biochemist, listening to the sounds of
battle some 20 kilometers to the west, and
waiting for the next bombardment,” says
Maksym Strikha, a physicist and former
top official in Ukraine’s science ministry.
“Could you imagine asking a Polish physi-
cist, surrounded and bombed in Warsaw in
September 1939, whether it would be fair to
maintain scientific diplomacy with scientists
in Nazi Germany?”
The repercussions in international science
are already being felt. The European Space
Agency (ESA) announced on 28 February
that international sanctions against Russia
and “the wider context” are likely to delay by
at least 2 years the launch of a Mars rover,
part of the ExoMars astrobiology missionjointly sponsored by Russia and ESA. And the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
is pulling out of a key collaboration with a
Russian university, the Skolkovo Institute of
Science and Technology (Skoltech), which
MIT had helped found.
Last week, as Russian troops crossed the
border, Ukrainian scientists pleaded for
more drastic steps. In an open letter posted
on 27 February, the Council of Young Sci-
entists at the Ministry of Education and
Science of Ukraine called on the European
Commission to “urgently suspend all kinds
of international collaboration with Russian
institutions,” including ending Russian sci-
entists’ participation in Horizon Europe,
the flagship research fund. They also urged
that Russia be expelled from two premier
international R&D ventures—the experi-
mental ITER fusion reactor in France and
the CERN particle physics research center
in Switzerland.
For now, Russia remains part of Hori-
zon Europe and other European funding
schemes. And the nine-nation collaboration
Danevich is involved in to examine the na-
ture of the neutrino—the Advanced Mo-
based Rare process Experiment (AMoRE)
at South Korea’s Yangyang UndergroundIN DEPTH
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITYBy Richard StoneWar in Ukraine poses stark choices for scientists
As Ukrainian researchers hunker down or flee, backlash against Russian science builds