In the coming days, the U.S. Senate is expected to confirm the new director of the National Institutes of Health. The key institution of American science has come under pressure from the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), which is headed by Elon Musk. Why the reforms initiated by Donald Trump’s people are reminiscent of the situation in Germany in the 1930s and how the DOGE plans threaten the development of science – the head of one of the laboratories of the National Institute of Health told T-invariant.

During the trial of physicist Oleg Kabov, it emerged that the criminal case had been initiated by two of his former students. One of them, after threatening Kabov, joined the FSB (Federal Security Service of Russia), after which the second student filed a denunciation against his former scientific supervisor. It also became clear that the embezzlement case lacked any financial evidence, and that the allegations regarding the falsification of Kabov’s scientific results had been manufactured by FSB officers. The prosecution is demanding a seven-year prison term, a significant fine, and a three-year prohibition on conducting scientific research. The defendant has asked the judge to reopen the investigation. The judge must now decide whether there is sufficient information to deliver a verdict or if the case should be sent back for further investigation.

Dismissals, fines, stigmatization, criminal cases, torture — all this awaits in Russia those who are trying to tell the truth, oppose war, protect peace, criticize the authorities or simply honestly do their academic and teaching work .
T-invariant and the CISRUS Centerwill work together to chronicle the persecution of scientists in Russia for as long as it continues. If you have witnessed or been the target of academic harassment, please contact us at [email protected].
The chronicle records violations of the rights and freedoms of scientists and teachersas citizens of the Russian Federation, as well as violations of their academic rights and freedoms by the leadership of their scientific institution.

In episode 15 of the podcast Invasion: Science in a Time of War, two scientists anonymously reveal that they consider both those who left and those who continue to work in Russian universities to be martyrs, and that it is no longer possible to be “ironically silent” about the NWO. They also tell us how students today are forbidden to deal with acute social topics, but are forced to study the question of “why young people join youth movements”.

T-invariant has repeatedly described how the Ministry of Education and Science and the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences are destroying the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IPPI RAS). The demonstrative cancellation of the contract with the head of the institute, Andrei Sobolevsky, ignoring the opinion of scientists, led to a conflict between the scientific staff and the new directorate, the departure of a number of employees to MIPT, and the appointment of Dmitry Repin, a scientist with a dubious reputation, as deputy director. The Academic Council of IPPI has recently been headed by Dissertnet members.

The Innopraktika Foundation of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, has made a number of statements about its readiness to gather development institutions into “one perimeter”. The public speaker to promote these initiatives was Tikhonova’s friend Natalia Popova, a former photo model and now the first deputy general director of Innopraktika. Over the past few years, Popova has been lobbying for Innopraktika’s interests in Africa and the BRICS countries, and probably wants to continue the reform of development institutions that began in 2020 but was interrupted.

An international team of scientists analysed 1,378 stories in the world’s leading media about casualties of the war in Gaza. It turned out that 85 per cent of these publications did not distinguish between fighters and civilians, and 95 per cent used data provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Why are reputable publications using inaccurate information and what can Israel do to counter this? T-invariant spoke to the initiator of the study – sociologist Tatiana Gleser.

The ETH Zurich has adopted new security rules that effectively make it impossible for Russian students to enrol in the university’s master’s and doctoral programmes. T-invariant managed to speak to students who have lost the opportunity to study at this prestigious institution and to take comments from the ETH itself.

An international team of scientists analysed 1,371 reports of Gaza war casualties and found that the information circulated by the world’s leading media outlets was falsified. In episode 15 of the Invasion: Science in a Time of War podcast, we speak with the initiator of this study, sociologist Tatiana Glaser.

In November 2024, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation recognized the International Association of Intellectual Games (IAIG) as an undesirable organization. This absurd, at first glance, decision was preceded by a long history of ethical transformation and split of the once united intellectual community. Today, this confrontation looks like it was caused by a war, and everyone writes about it. However, it is based on deep contradictions and psychological deformations that have been embedded since Soviet times.

The redistribution of the market for the publication and distribution of academic scientific journals has led not only to serious delays in the publication of scientists’ works, but also to Russia’s self-isolation in the global market of scientific periodicals. By the beginning of December 2024, almost 75% of Russian academic scientific journals have not gone to press on time. This is the price of striving to publish scientific journals with a “Russian identity” and without foreign influence. T-invariant tells us what has already happened to Russian scientific periodicals and what else may happen to them.