Without Russian help, climate scientists
worry how they’ll keep up their important work of documenting warming in the
Arctic.

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Europe’s space agency is wrestling with how
its planned Mars rover might survive freezing nights on the Red Planet without
its Russian heating unit.

And what of the world’s quest for
carbon-free energy if 35 nations cooperating on an experimental fusion-power
reactor in France can’t ship vital components from Russia?

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In scientific fields with profound
implications for mankind’s future and knowledge, Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing a swift and broad decaying of relationships
and projects that bound together Moscow and the West. Post-Cold War
bridge-building through science is unravelling as Western nations seek to punish
and isolate the Kremlin by drying up support for scientific programs involving
Russia.

The costs of this decoupling, scientists
say, could be high on both sides. Tackling climate change and other problems
will be tougher without collaboration and time will be lost. Russian and
Western scientists have become dependent on each other’s expertise as they have
worked together on conundrums from unlocking the power of atoms to firing
probes into space. Picking apart the dense web of relationships will be
complicated.

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The European Space Agency’s planned Mars
rover with Russia is an example. Arrays of Russian sensors to sniff, scour and
study the planet’s environment may have to be unbolted and replaced and a
non-Russian launcher rocket found if the suspension of their collaboration
becomes a lasting rupture. In that case, the launch, already scrubbed for this
year, couldn’t happen before 2026.

“We need to untangle all this
cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I
can also tell you,” the ESA director, Josef Aschbacher, said in an
Associated Press interview. “Dependency on each other, of course, creates
also stability and, to a certain extent, trust. And this is something that we
will lose, and we have lost now, through the invasion of Russia in
Ukraine.”

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International indignation and sanctions on
Russia are making formal collaborations difficult or impossible. Scientists who
became friends are staying in touch informally but plugs are being pulled on
their projects big and small. The European Union is freezing Russian entities
out of its main 95 billion euro ($105 billion) fund for research, suspending
payments and saying they’ll get no new contracts. In Germany, Britain and
elsewhere, funding and support is also being withdrawn for projects involving
Russia.

In the United States, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology severed ties with a research university it helped
establish in Moscow. The oldest and largest university in Estonia won’t accept
new students from Russia and ally Belarus. The president of the Estonian
Academy of Sciences, Tarmo Soomere, says the breaking of scientific connections
is necessary but also will hurt.

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“We are in danger of losing much of
the momentum that drives our world towards better solutions, (a) better
future,” he told the AP. “Globally, we are in danger of losing the
core point of science — which is obtaining new and essential information and
communicating it to others.”