Fight Or Flight

The journal Science notes that Ukrainian scientists are deciding whether to become resistance fighters against the Russian invasion, or to flee the country as refugees, giving this event a very human and practical dimension.

On 24 February, as Russian troops poured across the border in an unprovoked 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 diversity. 

Several kilometers to the south, Fedor Danevich and six colleagues at the Institute for Nuclear Research had joined an online workshop for a multinational physics 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. 

. . .

As Russian forces bombarded and sought to encircle Kyiv, Mosyakin and some fellow botanists hunkered down at home, whereas others took refuge with relatives in the countryside. 

Danevich says he and his wife intended to stay in Kyiv, but their son persuaded them to seek shelter in Budapest, Hungary. As Science went to press, the family 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 prominent 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 physicist, surrounded and bombed in Warsaw in September 1939, whether it would be fair to maintain scientific diplomacy with scientists in Nazi Germany?” 

. . .

In Europe, a number of institutions have offered refuge to Ukrainian scientists, some of whom have joined an exodus of more than 500,000 people from the besieged country. 

The Polish Young Academy, part of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), has lined up scores of institutes and universities willing to host refugee scientists. “We want to find them jobs in their expertise,” says Jacek Kolanowski of PAN’s Institute of Bioorganic chemistry. So far, they’ve secured positions for a psychologist in Warsaw, a cancer researcher in Lublin, and a law professor in Poznań.  

In Germany, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Philipp Schwartz-Initiative, which helps find succor for scholars at risk, has invited Ukrainian scientists to apply for funding with German partners. “Our lab in Berlin will support researchers who had to flee Ukraine,” tweeted Matthias Rillig, an ecologist at the Free University of Berlin.

Many Ukrainian scientists have vowed to stay and defend their homeland. “Virtually the entire population has taken up arms,” says Oleg Krishtal, a neurophysiologist with the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, who is sticking it out in Kyiv. 

Mosyakin says that although he is a mixture of at least four nationalities, “I am a Ukrainian, period.” And most Ukrainians he knows “are not afraid to die for their native land.”