Without Russia, science going solo on world’s woes, dreams
PARIS — Without Russian help, climate scientists worry how they’ll keep up their important work of documenting warming in the Arctic.
Europe’s space agency is wrestling with how its planned Mars rover might survive freezing nights on the Red Planet without its Russian heating unit.
And what of the world’s quest for carbon-free energy if 35 nations cooperating on an experimental fusion-power reactor in France can’t ship vital components from Russia?
In scientific fields with profound implications for mankind’s future and knowledge, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing a swift and broad decaying of relationships and projects that bound together Moscow and the West. PostCold 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.
The European Space Agency’s planned Mars rover with Russia is an example. Arrays of Russian sensors to sniff, scour and study the planet’s environment may have to be replaced and a non-Russian launcher rocket found if the suspension of their collaboration
becomes a lasting rupture. In that case, the launch, already scrubbed for this year, couldn’t happen before 2026.
“We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you,” said Josef Aschbacher, the ESA director. “Dependency on each other, of course, creates also stability and, to a certain extent, trust. And this is something that we will lose, and we have lost now, through the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.”
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 $105 billion fund for research, suspending payments and saying they’ll get no new contracts.
In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology severed ties with a research university it helped establish in Moscow. The oldest and largest university in Estonia won’t accept new
students from Russia and ally Belarus. The president of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tarmo Soomere, says the breaking of scientific connections is necessary but also will hurt.
“We are in danger of losing much of the momentum that drives our world towards better solutions, (a) better future,” he said. “Globally, we are in danger of losing the core point of science — which is obtaining new and essential information and communicating it to others.”
An online petition by Russian scientists and workers opposed to the war says it has more than 8,000 signatories. They warn that by invading Ukraine, Russia has turned itself into a pariah, which “means that we can’t normally do our work as scientists, because conducting research is impossible without fullfledged cooperation with foreign colleagues.”
The estrangement is being pushed by Russian authorities too. An order from the Science Ministry suggested that scientists no longer need bother getting research published in scientific journals, saying they’ll no longer be used as benchmarks for the quality for their work.