Scientists in Ukraine are still in survival mode following Russia’s invasion of the country, but as Ethan van Woerkom finds out, they are finding ways to continue their science
During the opening salvos of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022, academics across Europe quickly took to university mailing lists to discuss how to help their colleagues in Ukraine. While some Ukrainians managed to move to safer places across the continent, others decided to stay at home. Some 18 months on from the start of the conflict, Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv are still being attacked, but a semblance of stability is beginning to emerge.
With Ukraine starting to see successes on the battlefield, some displaced researchers are slowly coming back to their home institutes. One of those is astrophysicist Oleksiy Golubov from Kharkiv National University (KhNU) – one of the country’s leading institutions. He left Ukraine when war broke out, moving first to the Astronomical Calculation Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, and then the Poznan Observatory in Poland. But in July he decided to return home (see box “Oleksiy Golubov – returning home to build a ‘Ukrainian Boulder’”). “I moved back to Ukraine largely because I felt that I was not in the right place,” he says.
Golubov’s research group, however, still faces major problems. A significant number of colleagues entered military service and some have sadly died. They include Mykhailo Lesiuta, one of Golubov’s first students, who joined the army in 2022 and was killed fighting in Donetsk on 11 December 2022, aged 25. While student numbers entering physics at KhNU have recovered to pre-war levels, those students are scattered, working from across Ukraine and Europe.
The scars left by the Russian army as it advanced to the outskirts of Kharkiv in the first days of the war are still noticeable. The KhNU’s School of Physics and Technology, one of four distinct physics schools at the university, was completely destroyed on 11 March 2022 by Russian shelling. “We only just repaired this building before the war began,” says Golubov. “We cannot have laboratory classes for our students as the laboratories are destroyed.”
Other KhNU facilities, such as the School of Physics and the Astronomical Institute, avoided structural damage but scores of windows were broken when the adjacent district administration building was hit on 1 March 2022 by two Russian missiles. The strike killed 29 people. One of Golubov’s students was in the building. “She was not harmed, but it was very close,” he says.
KhNU’s Astronomical Institute operates an observational station in Chuhuiv, 70 km south-east of Kharkiv. It includes a 70 cm optical telescope – which is used for asteroid photometry studies – as well as UTR-2, the largest telescope in the world for radio waves with decametre wavelengths. When Russian forces were pushed out of the region in April this year, astronomers discovered that the station has been ransacked and mined with explosives. “They could not steal the big telescopes, but they took away the CCD cameras – one of the most expensive parts of the telescopes,” says Golubov. However, UTR-2’s control room has been destroyed beyond repair and CCD cameras were later found riddled with bullet holes.
Oleksiy Golubov – returning home to build a “Ukrainian Boulder”
Oleksiy Golubov completed his studies at Kharkiv National University (KhNU) in 2008 before carrying out a PhD on galactic dynamics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, which he completed in 2012. After a postdoc at the University of Colorado Boulder, US, Golubov returned to KhNU in 2014. Once the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, however, eight of the 10 members of Golubov’s research group left Kharkiv, moving within Ukraine or fleeing to elsewhere in Europe.
As Golubov is unfit for military service due to a paralysed left hand, he was exempt from the ban on men aged 18–60 leaving the country. Eventually, he managed to travel, and spent time as a visiting researcher at the Astronomical Calculation Institute at the University of Heidelberg and the Poznan Observatory in Poland. “My motivation was that all work was done online anyway,” he says. “In Europe I had a more stable situation, an Internet connection, no air alarms.”
While Golubov and his parents could leave Kharkiv, his godfather was less fortunate, getting trapped in occupied territory for months. Golubov’s research institute continued to function online, and he taught four courses over the following academic year. He managed to keep up his research and recently published a reconstructed orbit of the first iron meteorite instrumentally captured during its fall.
But the past 18 months have been far from easy for Golubov, who sank into a deep depression. “The conditions for my work were perfect – I had accommodation, I had good problems to work on and my colleagues and advisers were super motivating,” he says. “[But] I did almost nothing useful, I did not know what to start with.”
Shortly after Ukrainian forces pushed back and liberated Kharkiv, his godfather’s house was destroyed by Russian shelling along with most of Golubov’s possessions, which had been stored there temporarily. “My PhD hat from Germany, all my memories and, most unpleasantly, my library where I had hundreds of books, mostly about physics, mathematics, astronomy [were destroyed].”
Yet Golubov is trying to stay upbeat. Since 2022 he has written more than 1000 Wikipedia articles in Ukrainian about astronomy and his home city of Melitopol. “[It] is the city of my childhood, the city of my dreams,” he says. “I want to move to Melitopol and turn it into a Ukrainian Boulder, a Ukrainian Heidelberg. All my work in Kharkiv, Europe and America [is about] gaining enough experience to be able to go to Melitopol and work there fully independently.”
While foreign aid such as grants and collaborations initially targeted Ukrainian researchers with temporary positions abroad, there are now calls to support researchers in the country (see box “#ScienceForUkraine – providing support for Ukrainian researchers”). Indeed, a survey released in July revealed that 70% of Ukrainian scientists are in a worse financial position than in the first two months of the war, with only a third now having enough money for food.
Ukraine still faces significant human, material, monetary and security challenges that are preventing researchers from doing research or teaching students. Golubov’s funding situation is similarly precarious. His grant from the Ukrainian National Research Foundation recently ended and his position at KhNU has been reduced, resulting in his income falling by 80%. “If I did not have some savings, I am not sure if I could survive,” he says.<
Occupied territories
Dozens of other universities or institutes in Ukraine continue to be occupied by Russian forces, however. Indeed, some have been in Russian hands since 2014 following the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, which led 26 higher-education institutions to be relocated to other parts of Ukraine. One of those affected is Melitopol State Pedagogical University (MSPU), which is an occupied university in southern Ukraine. Founded exactly a century ago, before the war it hosted several modern laboratories and trained some 2000 teachers each year.
Katerina – who does not want to reveal her full name for fear of reprisal – was in Melitopol in March 2022 when war broke out. “In the first days, when we did not know what was happening in the university, the work of the university almost stopped,” she told Physics World. “A month later, we started working remotely and resumed the educational process.”
Teachers were called to return to work face-to-face and soon it became impossible to live under occupation. “Over half of my colleagues did not co-operate with the occupiers,” she says. “Then Russian soldiers came with machine guns and forced them to write applications for employment at a new Russian university.”
Katerina decided to flee Ukraine and her journey took her across five countries. She now lives and works elsewhere in Europe but the events of the past 18 months have left a deep wound. “[The occupation] was a shock. I couldn’t give lectures. It was very difficult for me to communicate with students because I did not know how to encourage them,” she says. “For seven months after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, I could not write a single scientific paper.” Occupying forces took over MSPU, merged it, renamed it and appointed new leadership. The university continues to educate its students online, both in free and occupied territories.
Part of that “freedom” has been provided by the Internet, which continues to play a key role for Ukrainian researchers and teachers. The Ukrainian Online Physics School was set up in July 2022 by teachers in Kherson and Kharkiv distraught to see that displaced children had become deprived of a quality physics education. The school now educates displaced 13–17-year-olds and, over the past year, has held online physics classes three hours a week, three times a week.
Horror and hope for Ukrainian scientists
The school has received support from Alexey Boyarsky, a cosmologist from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who helped initiate the project. Boyarsky and colleagues have also helped to supply battery packs so that teachers can continue lessons during blackouts, as well as terminals to access SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, which provides Internet in the country.
Despite the hardship, some sort of normality is starting to return. In August the Lviv Data Science Summer School 2023 was held in-person at the Ukrainian Catholic University, organized with aid from the non-profit US-based Simons Foundation and the US National Academy of Sciences.
“Lectures were held underground so even in the case of an alarm we could continue,” says Oleksii Ignatenko – a mathematician from the university, who co-organized the event. Still, there were interruptions. “One night was quite disturbing, with alarms at 4 a.m., so lecturers had to go to the shelter,” he says, though insisting that, despite these issues, the school was a “huge success”.
Ukrainian science is still in peril and the country will need peace for it to return to pre-war levels. Yet researchers in Ukraine are trying to stay positive, hoping that international organizations and individuals can help Ukrainian science to either slow its decay or even reverse it. The most important action anyone can take to help, it turns out, costs nothing. “I would ask people not to ignore what is happening in Ukraine,” says Golubov. “These are lives of real people who are suffering under Russian occupation.”
#ScienceForUkraine – providing support for Ukrainian researchers
#ScienceForUkraine is a community group of volunteer researchers and students from institutes in Europe and around the world who are supporting the Ukrainian academic community. They say help is possible in three different ways. One is to provide resident research opportunities to Ukrainian researchers abroad. The second is to create paid remote research positions, allowing Ukrainian scientists to work alongside international researchers while staying at their home institutions. The final approach is to fund research groups in Ukraine directly. Even small things, such as facilitating experiments, sharing article submission fees or sponsoring academic travel, can make a difference. Programmes that support researchers from Ukraine can be found at www.scienceforukraine.eu, including a £200,000 IOP Benevolent Fund that has already helped 31 Ukrainian physicists, with funds still available for applicants.
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- Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/ukrainian-scientists-attempt-to-move-forward-following-the-ravages-of-war/
