Writing in the journal Nature, associate professor in science, technology and innovation policy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne, Switzerland) Gaétan de Rassenfosse and his two co-authors reported that since February 2022, 18.5% of Ukraine’s scientists have left the country (17% of whom have since ceased practising science) and 15% of those who remained in Ukraine are no longer scientists.
The time the average scientist in Ukraine devotes to science has also been affected, declining by 26%, from 13 to 10 hours per week, they report in their article published at the end of last year.
“Our study is important because it’s the first one that exactly quantifies what has happened to Ukrainian scientists since the beginning of the war,” De Rassenfosse told University World News.
Loss of the most qualified scientists
De Rassenfosse’s team surveyed 2,559 scientists and former scientists both inside and outside Ukraine between late September and early December 2022.
The figure of 18.5% of Ukrainian scientists who have left the country “is surprisingly close to that estimated by the UNHCR for the whole Ukrainian population at the time of the survey”, they write, in an indication that Ukrainian scientists are not more likely to have fled the country than are other Ukrainians.
However, the distribution of scientists who have left is not equal across all cohorts. The most qualified scientists, as measured by the amount of time – 20 hours – devoted to research per week and who are in the top 10% most prolific, were also about 10% more likely to have left Ukraine than were other scientists.
“Scientists with the highest degree (PhD or ScD) were significantly more likely to leave Ukraine compared to other scientists (8%, 12% and 11% higher, respectively),” states the report. Scientists who have lost access to their laboratories are also about 10% more likely to have left Ukraine.
According to information provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, as of July 2023, 74 out of 300 universities were damaged or destroyed. About 51% of these are in the Eastern regions, and an additional 27% are in the South, notes the paper.
More recent figures from a UNESCO study published in March 2024 indicate that the cost of restoring Ukraine’s public scientific infrastructure will be more than US$1.26 billion.
The study reveals that 1,443 buildings and laboratories, as well as 750 pieces of scientific equipment, have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the war in February 2022.
Scientists from both the southern and eastern regions of the country, which are close to the front lines, are more likely to have accepted offers of employment from outside Ukraine.
Additionally, since the three universities in the Zaporizhzhya region, including the one in Melitopol, and the four in Kharkiv region, have relocated to safer quarters elsewhere in Ukraine, those scientists who remained with their home university are, by definition, displaced.
Two of the four largest groups to have left academic or research come from the southern and eastern regions of the country: they were 8% and 9% more likely to leave Ukraine, respectively.
An almost equal percentage of those who have lost access to their research labs report no longer being scientists. De Rassenfosse further found that “people who have left academia are about 18% more likely to have left Ukraine”, he told University World News.
Displaced scientists
In the weeks and months that followed the full-scale invasion, universities across Europe and North America cobbled together emergency teaching and research arrangements for displaced Ukrainian scientists.
Some 75% of these scientists reported engaging in active exchanges with their new colleagues, and 30% have submitted papers to peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings since arriving at their host universities.
De Rassenfosse’s team sounds a note of caution, however, when reporting that 64% of scientists in host institutions say they are being exposed to new ideas, methods or data.
“This can partly be explained by the fact that 25-40% of [these] scientists spend more than 10% of their research time in an entirely new field”, they write in the paper. This may not be an unalloyed good, De Rassenfosse warns, as “research fit” was secondary to the existential need to provide scientists with safe havens.
A further concern about scientists who have left Ukraine is their economic precarity. While 89% have contracts, only “14% of migrant scientists had secured a long-term contract in an academic host institution” and “only a fraction of these contracts lasted more than one year”, writes De Rassenfosse.
Those who stayed
“Effects of war” is a qualitative study, but De Rassenfosse’s team made the decision to begin their discussion of what they call the “overlooked majority” of scientists who have remained in Ukraine by letting us hear their words.
Some “stayers” remained to “help the armed forces”. One specified that he wanted to put his “genetic fingerprinting special[ty]” at the army’s service.
These words put clothes on figures like 40% of stayers conduct less research than before the war and 18.6% have reduced their research time to less than three hours per week. One in 10 of the stayers has ceased research entirely.
Some stayers told De Rassenfosse that continuing research under war-time conditions was impossible; 23.5% no longer had access to important inputs to their research.
The Russian missile, drone and bomb offensive on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure that has disrupted electrical power and internet access has badly wounded the country’s scientific enterprise.
“Blackouts and bombing almost totally blocked the realisation of the complex experimental protocols to study the nonlinear optical response of smart nanocomposites,” one respondent told the researchers.
Equally suggestive, though not quantitative, are the comments respondents made about the psychological reality of being scientists in a war zone. De Rassenfosse’s team took statements like, “Psychologically [it is] difficult for everyone to work,” as an explanation for why these scientists are less productive.
Other scientists reported that they were more productive because they “escap[ed] into writing articles to abstract [remove themselves] from [the] terrible realities” around them.
A lost generation
What concerns De Rassenfosse the most about his team’s findings is what they indicate about both the “brain drain” Ukrainian is experiencing and, even more alarmingly, what it means for the future.
There’s a large literature on brain drains, De Rassenfosse told University World News. It shows how the receiving country benefits, how it accelerates science in the receiving country.
By way of example, he pointed to the Nazi scientists who enriched American science: the most famous example being Dr Wernher von Brahun, inventor of the V2 rockets, which killed 5,000 people in Britain, France and Belgium between September 1944 and March 1945, and, later, father of the American space programme.
The combination of the 9% of scientists outside Ukraine saying that they will not return to the country or that it is unlikely that they will return, the 7.2% who were unsure, and the decline in the number of scientists in Ukraine practising science, will, De Rassenfosse and his co-authors fear, lead to “a lost generation of scientists”.
“This is so because young scientists [assuming they are not in uniform] simply do not have the mentors to direct their research.
“We will see this effect in five or 10 years when Ukraine will not have the scientific professors it needs,” he told University World News.