Russia has lost access to CERN in a sign that its war in Ukraine is causing a major scientific brain drain

Saving face

Russia has accused CERN of playing politics in the realm of scientific cooperation.

Some of its state-controlled media has also cast the move as a net gain for Russian research, and an own goal for the West, with pro-Kremlin outlet Sputnik citing a Russian expert as saying Europe was relegating itself to a “scientific slum.”

State news agency TASS also reported cheerily that its scientific horizon “remains open,” and that Russian scientists were already returning to work on “domestic mega science projects.”

“This is quite obviously a positive development for us in some respects,” Mikhail Kovalchuk, the head of the Kurchatov Institute research center, told local outlet Izvestia, per TASS.

But scientific experts Business Insider talked to had a different take.

“They are laughable comments,” said Roman Sidortsov, a Russian-born researcher focusing on energy policy in the US and Russia at the UK’s University of Sussex. “It’s unsubstantiated bravado,” he added.

Far from being a positive for President Vladimir Putin, CERN’s move puts Russian theoretical physics research at a huge disadvantage — and, Sidortsov said, exposes the country to brain drain.

Not only that, the research is highly dependent on pooled international expertise.

“If your institutions are isolated from the main body of people carrying out work in this area, you are not going to be able to progress your thinking and your understanding in the same way as you did,” he said.

Instead, what Russia is more likely to experience is a steady brain drain that has been going on since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said Sidortsov.

Hard science was one of Russia’s “remaining strengths” from the Soviet era, he said.

“But even that was eroding and eroding quickly. It’s not a dream job for a future graduate to be a theoretical physicist in Russia.”

And faced with the possibility of losing access to state-of-the-art equipment and a community of excellence, many Russian scientists are likely to seek work outside their home country, he said.

Indeed, around 90 Russian researchers who have worked with CERN have found new jobs at international institutions since 2022, Nature reported.

And in January, Novaya Gazeta Europe estimated that Russia had lost about 2,500 scientists since 2022.

A net loss for CERN, too

It’s not just Russia losing out, however.

“It’s a lose-lose-lose situation,” said Sidortsov.

Russia’s 4.5% budget contribution to CERN’s experiments, about $2.7 million, is now covered by “other institutes,” CERN spokesperson Arnaud Marsollier told BI.

And CERN has also taken on the cost of covering Russia’s contribution to the site’s next major upgrade, the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, which is set to come online in 2029, Marsollier said.

That amounts to about $47 million, according to Nature.

The experts BI spoke to mourned losing colleagues, even as some said sanctioning Russia was unavoidable.

“The relationship with Russian scientists has always been very strong because they have a very long and very good reputation in particle physics,” Grimes said.

Particle physicist Tara Shears, a professor at the UK’s University of Liverpool, said that scientists from Russian institutes were keeping many valuable experiments going. “These all need to be taken over by other members of the collaborations,” she added.

The scientific community has also lost the opportunity to expose a valuable group of people to Western freedoms, principles, and opposition to the Ukraine war, Grimes said.

Those values “seep down” in their communities, he said. “And now that won’t happen.”

Shaw said that CERN is a special community where the joint search for knowledge normally overrides national politics.

“It’s a huge success story of humanity being able to collaborate, and you really see that, because we all care about those quarks and photons, at the end of the day,” she said.