Denis Afanassyev, a physicist at Donetsk National University (DonNU), left behind two apartments after Russian-backed rebels took over parts of eastern Ukraine last year. His family owned them but was unable to sell them; he now considers the properties worthless. He also left a personal scientific library of 2000 books. As soon as his 16-year-old son graduated high school in May 2014, he and his family relocated nearly 1200 km to the west.
Afanassyev departed for a new life in Lviv months before DonNU was moved to Vinnytsya, in the central part of the country. “I made connections with colleagues from Lviv National University and Lviv Polytechnic,” he says. “They helped provide some financial support. And I was adopted as a scientist at Lviv Polytechnic.”
Researcher Dmytri Raspornya was working on his PhD thesis and helping to commercialize technologies developed at the Donetsk Institute for Physics and Engineering when the fighting flared. About 40 of his physics and engineering colleagues relocated, mainly to Kiev. But two of the university’s physics research groups wound up in other cities, and that complicated communications among them.
Although the scientists displaced to Kiev have space, “we don’t have our laboratories here,” says Raspornya. “We have no equipment; everything stayed there. There was no possibility of moving the equipment.” He reckons that it will take three to five years to rebuild the labs’ infrastructure.
More than 25 universities and research institutes with physical sciences programs have been forced to relocate from the separatist-controlled areas of the Donbass, an eastern region that includes the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The affected institutions include Donetsk National Technical University (now in Krasnoarmeisk), Luhansk National University (now in Starobilsk), East Ukrainian National University (now in Severodonetsk), the Institute for Physics of Mining Processes (now in Dnepropetrovsk), and other, smaller facilities.
Faculty and students of the relocated Donetsk National University gathered on 22 June for the dedication of a new computer lab funded with a donation from the Italian Physical Society. Fifth from the left in the back row (with mustache and glasses) is Maksym Strikha, president of the Ukrainian Physical Society and deputy minister for education and science. To his right is Anatoly Kargin, dean of the university’s faculty of physics and technology.
Faculty and students of the relocated Donetsk National University gathered on 22 June for the dedication of a new computer lab funded with a donation from the Italian Physical Society. Fifth from the left in the back row (with mustache and glasses) is Maksym Strikha, president of the Ukrainian Physical Society and deputy minister for education and science. To his right is Anatoly Kargin, dean of the university’s faculty of physics and technology.
Some 12 000 scientists from the Donbass were uprooted by the conflict, according to Ukrainian Physical Society president Maksym Strikha, who recently became the country’s deputy minister for education and science. Strikha and Mikhail Belogolovskii, a theoretical physicist at the Donetsk Institute for Physics and Engineering, estimate that roughly 1000 physicists and physics students have relocated from Donetsk and Luhansk institutions to Ukrainian-controlled areas. Although many scientists remain on the payrolls of their relocated institutes, others have had to start anew in Kiev, where the cost of living is the highest in the nation.
According to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, monthly salaries for scientists in 2014 averaged 3928 hryvnia. Hyperinflation has cut the US equivalent of that amount from $357 a year ago to around $177 recently. Starting salaries are much lower and don’t cover rent for a one-room flat in Kiev, say officials of CRDF Global, a US nonprofit that has been trying to assist the displaced scientists. “The salary is very little and is not enough for a comfortable life in Kiev,” says Raspornya.
The door is open
Ukrainian physicists’ appeals for help haven’t gone unheeded. Through an agreement signed in March by European commissioner Carlos Moedas and Ukrainian education and science minister Serhiy Kvit, Ukrainian researchers will be able to compete on equal terms with colleagues in European Union (EU) member states for research grants from Horizon 2020, the EU’s €80 billion ($88.3 billion), seven-year research and innovation fund. Ukraine, which is not an EU member, will have to pay only €17.7 million through 2020, just 5% of the fee it would otherwise have to contribute to participate in the Horizon program.
Belogolovskii, who also left behind a flat and all his belongings in Donetsk, chairs a fledgling binational working group of Ukrainian and Ukrainian American physicists. The group recently received its first donation: €3000 from the Italian Physical Society; most of the money was used to buy computers for the classrooms of the relocated DonNU. The physics department is now housed in a former diamond-cutting factory in Vinnytsya.
Yuri Strzhemechny, associate professor of physics at Texas Christian University, says the working group has a longer-term goal: “We want [Ukrainian physicists] to work Western style, to accept Western forms of organization. We want to help them establish links with the West and with the US in particular.”
Originally created in 1995 to help former Soviet weapons scientists find peacetime employment, CRDF Global has opened an emergency fund to provide equipment and financial support to displaced scientists. The fund is to be financed with individual and corporate donations and is also intended to pay for small grants for commercializing inventions.
Cathleen Campbell, CRDF president, says donations as small as $10 000 could be put to good use. “Institutes and universities that have moved need equipment for researchers to be able to do their work,” she says. “They need supplies, and that’s an area where we could start making a difference sooner rather than later.” Major pieces of lab equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, she notes.
Wendy Scott Keeney, CRDF’s vice president for development and marketing, says she is focusing fundraising efforts on Ukrainians and philanthropists living in the US and on corporations doing business in Ukraine or Eurasia. Campbell says she isn’t concerned that assisting Ukrainians might anger Russia, where CRDF also has ongoing operations.
The American Physical Society (APS) is offering free membership to Ukrainian physicists, says Amy Flatten, the society’s director of international affairs. Membership includes a subscription to Physics Today and access to travel support for those who are collaborating internationally but does not include access to APS journals.
Retired University of Michigan physicist George Gamota, who at age five fled Ukraine with his family during World War II, is among those urging greater APS involvement in relief efforts for the displaced physicists. He notes that APS was involved previously in Ukraine, helping physicists there find work following the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.
Other services APS is considering to help Ukraine include supplying webinars on topics of interest to Ukrainian physicists, helping develop online courses for students, and assisting in the review of grant proposals submitted to funding agencies, says Flatten. Should money become available for shipping lab equipment, APS might help promote and administer that process.
The equipment wish list ranges from low-temperature cryostats to high-resolution spectroscopes. Items as basic as digital oscilloscopes and electrical current testers may be needed, says Vladimir Shiltsev, director of the accelerator physics center at Fermilab and a member of APS’s Committee on International Scientific Affairs. “Not much is yet known about what to send and where to send it,” he says. “We are making the first steps in building connections.”
Gamota says he believes APS is the only US scientific society that has gotten involved so far in the relief effort.
Who will pay?
It’s unclear who will pay to ship donated equipment. Gamota says some universities have expressed a willingness to do so. But Thomas Kuech, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who recently met in Lviv with his Ukrainian collaborators on a CRDF-supported project, says red tape can stand in the way of universities donating old equipment. “I have stuff around my lab that I’d be happy to send them. I just know that it would be a quasi-herculean task,” he says. Whether property rights to the equipment fall to the university or the federal government depends on the agency, he says. If the equipment isn’t fully depreciated, it still has some book value, which complicates matters.
Kuech knows firsthand that steep Ukrainian tariffs have prevented the import of research materials that have little or no commercial value, such as silicon wafers containing Hall devices.
Belogolovskii, though, says the Ukrainian Parliament has tentatively okayed exempting donated secondhand equipment from duties, but that decision hasn’t been formalized. And US export controls may exclude some equipment that potentially has military uses.
Kuech says it’s challenging to match up Ukrainian and US scientists for joint research projects. After being approached by Ukrainian scientists at a conference on crystal growth in 2007, it took him six years to find funding for a collaboration.
“It would be great for us to have some joint projects where we would have the possibility to cooperate with US scientists who do some experimental work,” says Raspornya. “It’s really important for us to feel we are not alone, that somebody cares for us.”
One thing seems clear to the displaced physicists interviewed for this story: They won’t be returning to their former homes anytime soon, if ever. Says Raspornya, “The conflict is not solved, and I don’t believe it will be resolved in the near future.”
