Dozens of international scientists have arrived every year since 2000 at Russia's remote Northeast Science Station on the Kolyma River in Siberia to study climate change in the Arctic environment. This year it did not happen.
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry froze funds used to pay staff at the research station and to maintain instruments to measure the rate at which climate change is melting Arctic permafrost and how much methane, a powerful planet-warming gas, is being released .
Freezing the funds will likely lead to a break in continuous measurements at the station dating back to 2013 that have helped scientists determine the warming trend, Peter Hergersberg, a spokesman for the German-funded Max Planck Association, told Reuters.
"Russian colleagues at the Northeast Science Station are trying to keep the station functional," said Hergersberg. Speaking to the British agency, he refused to say how many funds were frozen.
Reuters spoke to more than two dozen scientists about the impact of the war in Ukraine on Russian science, and most of them expressed concern after tens of millions of dollars in Western funding were withdrawn.
Partnerships on “pause”
Hundreds of partnerships between Russia and Western institutions are on hiatus or canceled altogether, scholars said, as the invasion undoes years of building international cooperation after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Many communication channels are closed and research trips canceled indefinitely.
Among the projects affected by the suspension of Western aid are the construction of high-tech research facilities in Russia, such as an ion collider and a neutron reactor for which Europe has pledged 25 million euros.
Such technology would open up generations of research that would contribute to everything from fundamental physics to the development of new materials, fuels and pharmaceuticals, the scientists said.
An additional 15 million euros in contributions for the construction of low-carbon materials and battery technologies necessary for the energy transition to combat climate change have also been frozen, after the European Union suspended all cooperation with Russian entities last month.
"From the emotional side, I understand the suspension," said Dmitry Shchapashchenko, a Russian ecologist who has worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria since 2007.
But for science in general, he said that "this is a situation in which everyone loses. Global topics like climate change and biodiversity... can hardly be solved without Russian territory and the expertise of Russian scientists”.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a decline in Russian investment in science, and thousands of scientists moved abroad or left their fields of research.
"As scientists, we felt that our work was not appreciated," said Vladimir Romanovski, who studies permafrost and moved his research to Fairbanks, Alaska, in the 1990s.
"Practically, there were no funds, especially for field work".
Russian investment has since increased, but remains below that of the West. During 2019, Russia allocated one percent of GDP to research and development - or about 39 billion dollars.
Most of that money was spent on physics fields, such as space technology and nuclear energy.
By comparison, Germany, Japan and the United States spend about three percent of GDP on science. In the case of the USA, it amounted to 2019 billion dollars in 612.
Russian science received a boost through project partnerships with scientists from abroad. Russia and the US, for example, led the international consortium that launched the International Space Station in 1998.
Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, announced this month that it would suspend its involvement in the space station until sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine are lifted.
Russian scientists also participated in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, known as CERN. In 2012, the collider made a revolutionary discovery about the Higgs boson, about which there were only theories until then.
Scientific friendship with Europe continued unabated after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. However, CERN's board of directors announced last month that it was suspending any new cooperation with Russia.
Germany alone has given around 110 million euros to over 300 German-Russian projects over the past three years. An additional 12,6 million euros of EU funds were allocated to Russian organizations for around 18 projects ranging from arctic climate monitoring to infectious animal diseases.
Chemist Pavel Troshin recently received funding from the Russian government for his participation in a Russian-German effort to develop a new generation of solar cells to power communications satellites. However, with the German suspension the project is now uncertain.
Joint projects "are done for the benefit of the whole world, and cutting off Russian scientists... is really counterproductive," Troshin, who works at the Russian Institute for Chemical Physics Problems, told Reuters.
"I never expected something like this. This is shocking to me. I am very annoyed”.
Arctic darkness
Among the most urgent research projects now on hold are those to study climate change in the Russian Arctic.
"Two-thirds of the permafrost region is in Russia, so that's key data," said environmentalist Ted Schur of Northern Arizona University.
"If you remain without insight into permafrost changes in Russia, you will not actually be able to understand global permafrost changes".
That's alarming for scientists because global warming is melting long-frozen soil that contains about 1,5 trillion (thousand billion) metric tons of organic carbon—double the amount that's already in the atmosphere today.
As the permafrost melts, the organic material inside the ice breaks down and releases additional amounts of planet-warming gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. Scientists fear that such emissions could cause climate change to spiral out of control.
Scientists can use satellites to track changes due to melting, but they can't determine what's happening below the ground's surface, which requires on-site research, Shur said.
Russian scientists have been collecting and sharing data on permafrost for years, but Western researchers aren't sure those communication channels will remain open.
Letter of protest and letter of support
Projects covered by the state budget for the Russian Science Foundation in 2021 in the amount of about $213 million relied on partnerships with India, China, Japan, Austria and Germany, among others.
The institution did not respond to Reuters' questions about how the suspension of European cooperation would affect the work, saying only that the Foundation "will continue to support leading teams of researchers in their research projects."
Even if Russia succeeds in finalizing the works, it remains unclear how much the projects will suffer due to the lack of proper data analysis tools.
Physicist Efim Kazanov of the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod, near Moscow, said not having access to European equipment would affect his work on a high-energy laser to study topics that could expand our understanding of the universe.
Kazanov was among thousands of Russian scientists who signed an open letter, published in the independent online scientific publication "Troitius Variant", in which they say that Russia "doomed itself to international isolation" by invading Ukraine.
Many Russian scientists have also fled the country, said Alexander Sergeyev, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The protest letter was temporarily removed from the site after Russia passed a law on March 4 criminalizing "fake news" about the Ukrainian campaign.
On that day, a letter in support of the Russian invasion was published on the website of the Union of Russian Rectors, signed by 300 leading scientists, who were subsequently suspended from the membership of the European University Association.
Although foreign funding represents only a small portion of Russian investment in science, scientists have relied on that money to sustain projects and careers.
"Those joint research grants have helped many Russians," said Russian geographer Dmitry Streletsky, who works at George Washington University. "I am simply surprised that the EU is targeting scientists. It's not a good target”.
Bonus video:
