On May 19, the Commission on Combating Pseudoscience of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) issued a statement urging the exclusion of homeopathic drugs from mandatory clinical guidelines. It seemed like a routine step in the defense of scientific integrity, yet a document drafted in February waited three and a half months for publication. The reason lies in a fierce struggle within the RAS and beyond, where the homeopathic industry, backed by influential figures in the State Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament) and top officials within the RAS, is mounting an offensive. From censorship to political insinuations about “NATO conspiracies,” T-invariant uncovers how pseudoscience is encroaching on science in Russia.

On April 10, the Israeli mathematical community published a statement in support of Russian mathematician Mikhail Volkov, who is being pursued by the FSB, accusing him of financing extremism. Earlier it became known about the initiation of criminal proceedings against the 70-year-old scientist. It also turned out that Volkov was fired “one day” from the Ural Federal University back in February after 48 years of work at the university.

Alexei Soldatov, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur, one of the founders of Runet, who was convicted in a case of abuse of power, has been sentenced to Ryazan region. In an interview with T-invariant, his son Andrei Soldatov, editor-in-chief of the website “Agentura.ru”, told what may be behind his father’s case, what FSB supervisors at large enterprises and universities are really doing, and why in Russia, despite the large number of convicted scientists and representatives of the IT-sphere, there are no sharashki 2.0.

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.

The draft law granting the FSB oversight over scientists’ international collaborations appears to be more essential for the Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) than for the security service itself. However, the document’s drafters failed to account for the substantial resources required to develop and maintain these “government services for monitoring scientists.” It is already clear that, in its current form, the new legal framework will complicate operations for all parties involved: researchers, officials, and law enforcement. This conclusion was reached by T-invariant after analyzing the proposed amendments to the federal law “On Science and State Scientific and Technical Policy,” along with accompanying assessments from federal agencies, the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, and the RAS.

The Novosibirsk prosecutor’s office has come up with such a way of correcting physicist Oleg Kabov, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The prosecution asked for seven years in a general regime colony , a fine in the amount of his salary for three years, a restriction on leaving his place of residence and a three-year ban on scientific activity.

The Russian-American Association of Scholars has announced the names of the winners of the prize, which is awarded to members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora. This year they were Professor Ekaterina Zhuravskaya of the Paris School of Economics and Professor Vladimir Vapnik of Columbia University.

Moscow State University has announced the creation of the “world’s second or third most powerful” supercomputer, having purchased components for it through a Chinese firm trading on AliExpress. T-invariant tells us how, under conditions of total sanctions on Sparrow Hills, they managed to assemble a classified computing complex and what Vladimir Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova and her Institute of Artificial Intelligence have to do with it.

How do universities in exile try to preserve academic freedoms for those who have lost them? Why and at what point does the idea of boycotts of universities begin to contradict academic freedoms? T-invariant spoke to Dmitry Dubrovsky, PhD in History, Professor at the Free University.

The harsh sentence for the scientist is not an exception to the rule, but the current norm. It was not by chance that the prosecution asked to give Shiplyuk the maximum possible 20 years: the cruelty of the repressions is directly related to the war in Ukraine. Moreover, in the summer of 2023, amendments were made according to which life imprisonment can be given for high treason.

T-invariant is starting a series of materials about the state of the supercomputer industry in Russia and the world. Today we will tell you about the brightest player in this small but strategically important market — the company T-Platforms and its founder — Vsevolod Opanasenko, who has been living under a criminal case for the last five years.

33-year-old physicist Artem Khoroshilov is accused of treason. The FSB declared him a hacker who, on orders from the Ukrainian Armed Forces, organized “attacks on critical information infrastructure facilities.” The employee of the Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences could face life imprisonment.