On November 7, 2026, Saint-Denis City Hall in France will host an evening of solidarity with Russian mathematician and political prisoner Azat Miftakhov. The event is being organized by Solidarité FreeAzat and partner associations with the participation of the city’s mayor, Bally Bagayoko. Earlier, the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS) appealed to Gennady Krasnikov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, asking him to ensure Miftakhov’s safety after human rights advocates reported that he had been tortured in a penal colony.

Twenty-seven-year-old Moscow mathematician Semyon Krasotkin is accused of high treason. Investigators allege that he sent paid reactions worth a total of 2,200 rubles to Ukrainian and Russian opposition Telegram channels. According to Krasotkin’s relatives, FSB officers beat him and tortured him with electric shocks after he was detained. His is not the only such case: human rights defenders are already aware of 11 criminal prosecutions over Telegram Stars. T-invariant tells Semyon Krasotkin’s story and examines how ordinary reactions in a messenger app can become grounds for criminal prosecution.

The latest period in Russian literature, which evidently began on February 24, 2022, just as it did in education and science, has so far received little systematic study. There are, of course, more and more conference papers and articles on individual authors and phenomena, and conferences now bring together dozens of specialists. Clearly, systematic book-length studies of this period’s literature can only be published outside Russia, and foreign scholars are helping make them possible. Some of them have taken on the painstaking work of tracking every significant new release and translating and analyzing these texts. One of them, French literary scholar Antoine Nicolle, recently defended his doctoral dissertation, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. It is effectively the first attempt to systematically map the part of Russian literature usually described as anti-war or oppositional. T-invariant asked Nicolle how a scholar who started out as a Rimbaud specialist got hooked on contemporary Russian literature, how that literature has responded to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the suffering it has brought to that country, and what “being Russian” means for Russian writers today.

What restrictions now govern the teaching of the humanities at Russian universities? How are they enforced in practice? And how do faculty and students try to get around them? The list of forbidden topics and actions is broadly known and fairly predictable. How these bans actually work, however, only becomes clear through the kind of in-depth conversations with faculty members that T-invariant conducted. Seventeen interviews point to a preliminary conclusion: despite regional, institutional, and disciplinary differences, most of the work of enforcing the new bans is done not by inspectors but by the instructors themselves. In other words, under the new conditions self-censorship has become the main regulatory mechanism, and each instructor monitors and reflects on it in considerable detail.

Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.

T-invariant presents the latest regular report Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 37, dated September 30, 2026. The Russian government has approved the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036. One of the key issues the Concept highlights is restricted access to international scientific and technical information. Below, we briefly comment on what access to foreign journals looks like today and what is at stake.

Oleg Zaslavskii has worked at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (KhNU) for almost forty years, studying general relativity, gravitation, and black hole physics. But two papers he coauthored with a Russian colleague who has spoken out against the war have cost him his funding. For ten months now, Zaslavskii has gone without a salary and has been unable to propose new research projects. In wartime, should sanctions policy take an individual’s stance into account — or does any interaction with someone from a Russian institution automatically count as cooperation with Russia?

Research institutes and universities across Russia are keeping blacklists of their own staff. T-invariant has identified two patterns of pressure on scientists and faculty: they are summoned for “conversations” with FSB officers, or they are left without work when an expiring contract is quietly not renewed.

Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.