Dear members and friends of the DMG,
"Inter arma silent musae – under arms, the muses are silent," stated Wilhelm von Bode, art historian and General Director of the Royal Prussian Museums in Berlin, in 1917, in a variation of a Cicero quote. The Muses, in Greek mythology, are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), who are responsible for the fine arts and the natural and social sciences. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has let the weapons do the talking, and among other things, the EU has decided on an extensive list of sanctions to isolate the aggressor, especially on an economic level. The purpose of economic isolation becomes immediately clear, as any foreign exchange gains serve to strengthen the military.
When it comes to the exclusion of Russian athletes from international sporting events, opinions are more divided. Are individual athletes not being punished excessively, especially if they have spoken out against the war? It is clear that sporting successes are always exploited for propaganda purposes, and one does not want to give the dictator a platform. But what about scientific cooperation with colleagues at Russian institutions? Is it justifiable and advisable to suspend all German-Russian research collaborations? As is well known, the Alliance of Science Organizations had already recommended at the beginning of March 2022 to freeze cooperation with state institutions in Russia, and many universities and large research institutions like CERN and DESY had quickly implemented this recommendation. Since then, the DFG has not accepted new applications or continuation applications based on a German-Russian cooperation. Neither data nor samples or equipment should be exchanged, there should be no guest stays in Russia, and of course, there should be no financial transactions.
The BMBF and the EU Commission have also stated that a country that conducts an aggressive war and disregards fundamental international values cannot be a partner in science and research, and they have frozen cooperation with Russia and Belarus. However, this primarily concerns official cooperation between institutions, which is not the same as cooperation between individual scientists. All the mentioned institutions have explicitly distinguished in their statements between Russian institutions, researchers at Russian institutions, and researchers with Russian citizenship outside of Russia. For the latter group, they call for solidarity and warn against stigmatization, discrimination, or isolation at institutes in Germany and the EU – I would like to wholeheartedly agree with this!
The difficult question remains regarding how to handle cooperation with individual colleagues in Russia (and Belarus). This is not a hypothetical question. It concerns many of us, many DMG members, and many readers of GMIT. Some of us have maintained collaborations with colleagues in Russia for decades, and many friendships have developed. At the very beginning of the war, around 7,500 scientists in Russia also spoke out very clearly and unequivocally against the war in an open letter. The argument that a complete cessation of all cooperation also affects this group cannot be ignored. And even before the war, it was precisely the open-minded, cosmopolitan individuals who sought and built international cooperation, so that now the wrong ones are being punished and the nationalists, who have chosen their isolation themselves, are not being reached at all.
International networks of scientists with active professional and personal exchanges are also suitable, similar to city partnerships, to serve as peace-building and as a seedbed for rapprochement. On the other hand, it is clear that prestigious scientific discoveries, similar to a sports award, also mean prestige for the aggressor and that a multitude of active research cooperations would be gratefully seized upon by the dictator and exploited propagandistically as evidence of a supposedly lacking support for state sanctions among European scientists.
At CERN, where hundreds of manuscripts had been left unpublished in limbo, a practical solution has now been agreed upon: All authors are named and listed with their ORCID, but no Russian affiliations are mentioned in the publication itself; these only appear in the metadata. This is possibly comparable to athletes competing under the Olympic flag without any indication of their nationality.
Another problem for which there is currently no solution is long-term research projects with international participation within Russia that rely on on-site data collection. In the field of geosciences, the investigation of permafrost in the Siberian Arctic and its changes due to anthropogenic climate change is particularly noteworthy. In the joint meeting of the DMG board and advisory board in February, some of these points were discussed as needed. There was a request from a DMG member for travel support to present research results from an active collaboration with a Russian university at an international conference. The board decided negatively on the application because this type of official cooperation between the institutions cannot receive financial support from the DMG. The decision would likely have been different if the authors, following the example of CERN, had not mentioned the Russian affiliation. This may open up a path for the Muses and for the preservation of networks as peacekeeping forces in the future.
— Your Horst Marschall
