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Physics community condemns Russia

Physics World April 2022

Physics World

 
News & Analysis Physics World  April 2022

Physics community condemns Russia

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with an unprecedented response from the international scientific community, which will have far-reaching repercussions for science. Michael Banks investigates

(Courtesy: Shutterstock/Tomas Ragina)

Despite Russian troops hovering on the Ukrainian border for weeks, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began in the early hours of 24 February, was still met with shock by the international community. Weeks of bombardment and bloodshed soon followed, together with a refugee crisis as millions fled the ravages of war. The worldwide response was swift with economic sanctions imposed on Russia and many international companies pulling operations from the country.

There was also an unprecedented reaction from the international scientific community, with many physicists, scientific societies (see “Physics and astronomy societies worldwide express horror at invasion”) and funding agencies voicing their fears over a prolonged conflict that has already started to devastate Ukraine. The uproar from science, however, began from the Russian scientific community itself. Within hours of the invasion, scientists and science writers in Russia had circulated an open letter that called for an “immediate halt” to the operation against Ukraine, stating that Russia had “doomed itself” to international isolation. It warned that Russia risked becoming a “pariah country” and that isolation would result in further “cultural and technological degradation” of the country with the war representing a “step to nowhere”. 

The letter, which also demanded “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state,” was first published on the independent Russian science news site TrV-Nauka. It was later posted elsewhere after TrV-Nauka was banned following the increasingly hostile environment that soon emerged in Russia over speaking out against the war (see “Crisis in Ukraine”). When Physics World went to press, the letter had been signed by almost 8000 people including the condensed-matter physicist Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics with Andre Geim for their work on graphene.

Mikhail Glazov, a condensed-matter theorist from the Ioffe Institute in St Petersburg, who also signed the letter, told Physics World that personal, cultural and scientific ties between people in Russia and Ukraine remain solid. “These ties should help to form a basis for negotiations,” he says. “I do not think that the army should resolve conflicts. We all need to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict.” 

An international response soon followed. On 1 March more than 130 Nobel laureates issued a declaration calling for peace, in the wake of the “explicit threat of nuclear weapons” that Russian president Vladimir Putin made during a TV address on 27 February. Pointing out that the discovery of nuclear fission had led to the construction of nuclear weapons, the declaration stated that “their current volume has the potential to make the Earth uninhabitable for humans and to wipe out human civilization…and must therefore never be used”.

The laureates, who included Geim and other physicists such as former US presidential science adviser Steven Chu, called on governments and business leaders to “use scientific knowledge and technologies responsibly and with awareness” for their long-term consequences. “Only in this way can human civilization continue to develop in a respectful manner towards nature and the Earth’s system in the future.” Since signed by more than 200 laureates, the letter ends by calling on Putin “to respect the agreements under international law, to recall his armed forces, to start negotiations and to establish peace”. 

 

Demanding peace Steven Chu and other Nobel laureates have called for an end to hostilities. (Courtesy: Royal Society)

International decisions

The raft of sanctions from Europe and the US imposed following the invasion of Ukraine have already had huge repercussions for scientific projects and collaborations. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) took a firm line within the first week of the conflict, insisting that it would stop all science and research collaboration with Russia as well as vocational education and training. That move led to specific scientific collaborations with Russia being completely frozen.

One of the casualties has been eROSITA – an X-ray survey instrument designed and built by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching – which was put into “safe mode”. As one of two instruments aboard the German–Russian Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (Spektr-RG) X-ray space telescope, eROSITA is designed to detect 100,000 galactic clusters and thereby constrain the properties of dark matter and dark energy. Scientists at institutions in Germany were also allowed to remove their name from publications that included Russian co-authors, while there was a wider growing call for journals to begin boycotting Russian scientists. 

Days following the German move, the European Commission suspended its co-operation with Russia on research and innovation. It said it would “not conclude any new contracts nor any new agreements” with Russian organizations within the96bn Horizon Europe programme and that it was suspending payments to Russian entities under existing contracts. “All ongoing projects, in which Russian research organizations are participating, are being reviewed,” the statement noted. UK Research and Innovation – the umbrella organization for the UK’s seven research councils – also paused all grant payments for projects involving Russian partners. 

The isolation of Russia immediately drew attention to the CERN particle-physics lab, which must balance the sanctions imposed by member states while maintaining collaborations in the name of “science for peace”. Russia had been awarded “observer” status at the lab in 1993, which meant it was able to attend council meetings but not take part in decision making. On 8 March, however, CERN’s council took the unusual step of suspending Russia’s observer status. In an official statement, CERN’s 23 member states condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and criticized the involvement of Belarus, which is a non-member state but has had a “co-operation agreement” with CERN since 1994

John Ellis, a particle physicist from King’s College London, who has spent most of his career at CERN, said the announcement had come as a “relief”. “There were fears that council would want to terminate all collaboration with Russian institutes and/or all Russians, and this danger has been averted,” he told Physics World. 

Another major international lab with a significant Russian contribution is the ITER experimental fusion reactor, which is currently being built in Cadarache, France. A spokesperson for ITER told Physics World that they did not know what effect the events will have on the ITER project, despite Russia covering 9% of ITER’s cost. “It is too early to draw conclusions,” the spokesperson said. “Our hope is that all ITER members will remain committed to collaboration on our shared vision of a shared future – which includes making fusion power a reality as a safe, environmentally friendly, and virtually unlimited source of energy.” 

Our hope is that all ITER members stay committed to collaboration on our shared vision of a shared future

Up in the air

The freezing of collaborations between the west and Russia is likely to have a longer impact in space, where Russia works with the US and Europe on many different projects. NASA said it was continuing to work with all international partners, including the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, for the “ongoing safe operations” of the International Space Station. “The new export control measures will continue to allow US–Russia civil space co-operation,” NASA said in a statement. “No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations.”

But there have already been signs of friction in Russia’s relationship with Europe and the US. Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin, for example, initially took a measured line, noting on Twitter that “NASA confirmed its willingness to continue to co-operate with Roscosmos”. He also added that “we continue to analyse the new US sanctions to detail our response”. Later, however, Rogozin announced that the Russian space agency would be withdrawing its technical personnel, including launch crew from Kourou in French Guiana. 

Thierry Breton, the European Union’s commissioner for space, insisted that the decision by Roscosmos would have “no consequences on the continuity and quality” of the EU’s Galileo global navigation satellite system or the Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. “Nor does this decision put the continued development of these infrastructures at risk,” Breton added. “We are ready to act decisively, together with the member states, to protect these critical infrastructures in case of aggression, and continue to develop Ariane 6 and Vega-C to ensure Europe’s strategic autonomy in the area of launchers.”

Several European-led missions that are scheduled to be launched via Russian-built rockets either later this year or in 2023 will be affected. They include the Rosalind Franklin rover, previously known as the ExoMars, which is a joint mission between Roscosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA). Originally scheduled to take off in September from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, ESA said that the launch of ExoMars was now “very unlikely” to happen this year and later suspended work towards launch entirely. Given that the orbital dynamics of Earth and Mars mean that launch windows only open for a short period every two years, the mission is now unlikely to take off until 2024 at the earliest.

Another potential casualty is ESA’s 500m Euclid mission, which was expected to take off on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2023 from Kourou in French Guiana. Euclid is designed to explore dark energy and dark matter, using a 1.2 m-diameter telescope, a camera and a spectrometer to plot a 3D map of the distribution of more than two billion galaxies. 

As Physics World went to press, it did not appear that the invasion of Ukraine will be swiftly reversed or that peace would settle quickly. In fact, it seemed likely that the situation in Ukraine would take many months – if not years – to resolve. Many scientists, however, were hoping that peace will somehow win out. As the Russian open letter – signed by thousands of researchers in early March made clear: “Let’s do science, not war.”