Concerning CERN Russia’s Ukraine invasion and Putin’s top science whisperer end 70 years of nuclear research collaboration with Europe
Last month, the five-year agreement between the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Russia expired, ending seven decades of close collaboration between Soviet (and later Russian) physicists and the world’s leading high-energy physics laboratory, where scientists study the interactions of elementary particles and the collision energies of atomic nuclei. The outlet T-invariant examined how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest associates, Kurchatov Institute President Mikhail Kovalchuk — unraveled Russia’s ties to CERN. Meduza is republishing this article with minor edits.
Why it took CERN and Russia almost three years to spin down their collaboration
Cutting CERN’s ties to Russia and Belarus took considerable time, but the organization was quick to condemn the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within days of Putin’s attack order, the laboratory’s governing body, the CERN Council, vehemently condemned Moscow’s actions and indefinitely suspended Russia’s status in CERN. The council also banned any new projects with Russian institutions.
At the same time, hundreds of Russian physicists collaborating with CERN signed an open letter in protest against the invasion, expressing solidarity with a broader anti-war appeal endorsed by more than 8,500 scientists and science journalists, published in six languages on T-invariant’s website.
In its March 2022 resolution, the CERN Council pledged to support initiatives assisting Ukrainian researchers and projects in high-energy physics and to observe the international sanctions imposed on Russia. At the same time, the organization’s leadership expressed support for members of the Russian scientific community who protested the war.
Two weeks later, in late March, CERN further tightened its rules on collaboration with Russia and Belarus, completely suspending cooperation with what was once nicknamed the “Soviet CERN”: the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), an intergovernmental organization founded in 1959 outside Moscow in Dubna.
Scientists affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research were barred from participating in JINR’s scientific councils and committees — and vice versa. All joint conferences and seminars organized by JINR and CERN were similarly canceled. Additionally, JINR lost its observer status at CERN, and CERN jettisoned its observer status at JINR.
In June 2022, the CERN Council convened again and shifted its “freeze” on cooperation with Russia to a complete halt.
Under the new policy, Russian scientists, engineers, and IT specialists who held CERN passes in the spring and summer of 2022 could continue working there until November 30, 2024. But that was it. CERN would issue no new passes to anyone from Russian or Belarusian institutions and universities.
The CERN Council’s final vote on the “Russian question” came on December 15, 2023. Member states voted to remove Russia from CERN’s list of partners and to end the Large Hadron Collider’s collaboration with scientists affiliated with Russian research institutes and universities.
Three days later, Russian participants received a letter (T-invariant obtained a copy), which stated, among other things:
We understand that this decision may have a significant impact on some of you, as well as on your family members. The User Support Office remains available to assist you. […] We would like to inform you of the administrative implications of this decision: if your cooperation agreement with CERN extends beyond November 30, 2024, it will be automatically terminated on that date.
The CERN Council doesn’t disclose its voting results, but The Geneva Observer reported that representatives from Hungary, Israel, Italy, Serbia, Slovakia, and Switzerland abstained when the group terminated scientific collaboration with Russia. These member states weren’t alone in having reservations about “letting politics win.” Many prominent physicists from around the world advocated for the continued participation of Russian physicists, and some even formed a community called Science4Peace.
Both supporters and opponents of severing ties — among scientists and politicians alike — lobbied publicly and behind the scenes throughout 2024. The tenacity of these efforts was due primarily to lingering questions about whether Russian and Belarusian physicists might retain their “window to Europe” through the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.
The CERN ‘loophole’ and how Putin, Kovalchuk, and Ukrainian physicists responded
On June 20, 2024, the CERN Council unexpectedly voted to extend its agreement with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, which had been frozen since 2022. According to T-invariant, 13 of the organization’s 23 member states voted to terminate the collaboration, but a two-thirds majority was needed to pass the resolution. (T-invariant’s sources said the same thing happened three months earlier, in March 2024, when Germany’s abstention proved decisive.)
Before the council’s final decision to end cooperation with Russian scientists, their Ukrainian colleagues became more outspoken in the media and within CERN. Additionally, Vladimir Putin and Kurchatov Institute President Mikhail Kovalchuk became directly involved in the dispute.
Kovalchuk’s better-known brother, Yuri, owns Bank Rossiya and is Vladimir Putin’s long-time friend. Mikhail, meanwhile, is infamous for transmitting pseudoscientific ideas to Putin and high-ranking Russian officials. One of his favorite myths is that “the West, in violation of all moral and legal norms, is conducting highly dangerous experiments at psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine and Georgia to create biological and new chemical weapons.” (Officials in the Kremlin reportedly fear these fictional “gene bombs” are capable of singling out ethnic Russians.) Kovalchuk has also suggested that the U.S. is engineering a new “subspecies of service humans.”
On June 5, 2024, The Times published an article where scientist Borys Grynyov, the Ukrainian delegation’s representative to the CERN Council, warned that continued collaboration with JINR granted Moscow “a backdoor through which Russian spies are able to access the very latest advances in science.” Grynev, who served as the Ukrainian government’s official representative to JINR for more than two decades, urged his colleagues to vote against renewing the agreement with Russia.
In response, CERN’s press office issued a cautious statement emphasizing that the laboratory is a peaceful and transparent organization.
Vladimir Putin was not so demure. About a week after Grynev’s comments, Russia’s president unexpectedly traveled to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research outside Moscow, supposedly to initiate the long-under-development NICA collider’s technological operation phase (in reality, it was just a routine test of the accelerator’s circuits and magnets).
The other half of Putin’s publicity stunt was to convene and address a large meeting of scientist-laureates of the Russian government’s Science Megagrant Competition (a rare example of a major and successful international project in Russian science). “We’re not closing anything, not hiding anything, and not locking down anything. We are open to cooperation… Russia is open to ensuring that the results of Russian scientists’ work are put to use in other countries,” the president told his audience.
Scientists who spoke to T-invariant said Putin’s remarks signaled that JINR, though formally an intergovernmental scientific center founded by 13 countries, ultimately belongs to Russia’s domain of “sovereign physics.”
Putin’s visit to JINR sparked another round of activism from Ukrainian scientists. Physicist Tatiana Berger-Gryneva, who heads a group in the ATLAS experiment (the Large Hadron Collider’s biggest general-purpose particle detector experiment), sent out a detailed email using CERN’s mailing list. Her message highlighted statements made at Putin’s meeting, quoting the Russian president, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, and JINR director Grigory Trubnikov — all cited with hyperlinks to the Kremlin’s official webpage. At the end of her email (T-invariant obtained a copy), Berger-Gryneva offered the following conclusion:
This visit clearly illustrates JINR’s position as an organization operating in the interests of Russia’s military-industrial complex, just days before the CERN Council decides on cooperation between CERN and JINR.
T-invariant’s sources say Putin’s PR show in June was the work of Mikhail Kovalchuk, who’s widely regarded as the president’s “top science man.” “Kovalchuk has spent years persuading Putin and other officials to favor isolationism, and everyone knew he opposed JINR serving as a backdoor into CERN. His actions influenced the outcome, leaving the agreement with the joint institute effectively neutered,” said another ATLAS experiment group leader who’s been at CERN for more than 30 years.
Kovalchuk vs. CERN’s Russian physicists
Physicists worldwide hoped the “Soviet CERN” outside Moscow would become a neutral place for Russian scientists, but that has not happened. The only JINR scientists allowed to work at the Large Hadron Collider are those whose affiliation predates Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the West’s retaliatory sanctions. No new passes are coming.
“An important item on the Council’s June agenda was the agreement with the intergovernmental organization located in Dubna, Russia, with which CERN has collaborated since 1957. As the Council decided not to terminate the agreement, JINR continues to participate in CERN’s activities. However, the measures against JINR adopted by the Council in March 2022 remain in force,” CERN director Fabiola Gianotti explained in an internal letter shared with T-invariant.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Kovalchuk has prohibited everyone under his control from seeking out “loopholes” at CERN or obtaining JINR affiliation. Multiple scientists confirmed to T-invariant that these restrictions are in place for employees at the Kurchatov Institute and staff at subordinate or affiliated research institutes and universities (most of which employ scientists specializing in CERN-related topics).
Kovalchuk makes no effort to conceal these limits. On March 20, 2024, he referred to the break with CERN as a “gift” to Russia:
Most Russian specialists at CERN are Kurchatov Institute employees — they’re our people. It’s basically a gift for us to get these people back. They’re trained by us, raised by us, and aligned with us both ideologically and scientifically.
During a meeting with Putin on September 20, Kovalchuk claimed that scientists “returning to Russia” would lead to a “technological breakthrough” and help transform the country’s scientific infrastructure into “the best in the world.” In an interview two months later, Kovalchuk described efforts to turn JINR into a “neutral affiliation” for Russian physicists as a Western ploy to exploit Russia’s scientific resources:
The West devised a veiled scheme to reintegrate Russian scientists into CERN. The idea was for Russian employees to return to their home institutes in Russia, simultaneously gain affiliation with the intergovernmental JINR outside Moscow, and then continue working at CERN as members of an international organization as if nothing had happened. However, Russia categorically refuses to cooperate with the West under such a scheme.
Kovalchuk promotes an “alternative narrative for his own selfish interests,” said T-invariant’s source in CERN’s ATLAS experiment, arguing that his rhetoric’s only purpose is to please President Putin. The same source said Kovalchuk’s role in unraveling Russia’s relationship with CERN is significant, and the damage he’s wrought will take “several generations” to repair, regardless of how soon the war in Ukraine is resolved.
Physicists who spoke to T-invariant said they expect the collaboration collapse to have the greatest impact on Russian students and postgraduates. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve tried convincing CERN’s leadership to allow new users, even younger ones, but it didn’t work out,” complained one Russian scientist. “After November 30, remote access to CERN data will be extended for a short time only to Russians with PhD status, so they can complete their dissertations. Those of us who have been working here for many years will find positions somewhere in Europe — there are probably about a hundred of us — but there are no prospects [in Russia] for young people in cutting-edge experimental physics.”
Story by T-invariant
Translation by Kevin Rothrock