After years of failed experiments, long nights in the laboratory, and repeated funding rejections, you stumble upon a paper from a Russian group with a promising technique that can make your idea work. After some contacts and running some experiments on the equipment with your samples, you see promising results. Alone, neither side can move forward, but together, the work begins to make sense.
Then, on 22 February 2022, in the midst of preparation for funding with your preliminary data, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Within weeks, institutional partnerships are suspended, funding agencies freeze international collaborations, conferences stop accepting researchers from certain countries, and scientific societies begin to revise their policies under political pressure. In your laboratory, the atmosphere changes gradually. What was once a purely scientific discussion became something heavier. Some colleagues argue that continuing the collaboration would indirectly legitimise a government responsible for violence and human rights violations. Others insist that science should remain independent from political conflict, especially when the work could eventually lead to treatments that save lives.
Your collaborator sends an email asking: will the project continue?
What would you do? Do you stop the collaboration, by principle and accepting that the research may end here, or do you continue, knowing that the decision will carry a moral weight inevitably?
Can Science Ever Be Fully Separate from Politics
Science needs to be universal, since it is a system in which researchers collaborate across borders, share knowledge, and work on problems that affect humanity as a whole. Diseases do not recognise political systems, climate change is not confined by national boundaries, and many scientific challenges require coordination between countries that may otherwise be in conflict. In that almost utopic view, science appears almost like a parallel language, one that exists above the instability of politics.
Yet history repeatedly shows that this separation is fragile. During periods of conflict, scientific collaboration becomes entangled with sanctions, ethical judgments, diplomatic decisions, and public pressure, often in ways that are not decided by scientists alone. The structure that allows science to function internationally is also the structure that makes it vulnerable when that international order breaks down.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, multiple universities, scientific societies, and funding agencies suspended collaborations with Russian institutions. Similar discussions have emerged in relation to China, Iran, and, more recently, in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict. These decisions are rarely scientifically motivated in a narrow sense; instead, they are political, ethical, and symbolic. Continuing collaboration can be interpreted as preserving scientific openness and maintaining dialogue despite conflict, but it may also be perceived as a form of complicity or indirect tolerance toward the actions and ideology of a government. On the other hand, suspending collaboration may be viewed as an ethical position and a demonstration of political accountability.
This is where the paradox becomes clear. The same openness that accelerates scientific discovery also allows knowledge to circulate in a world where political systems are not neutral. Science is no longer only an intellectual activity isolated from external forces.
The Invisible Cost of War in Science
When war is discussed publicly, the focus is usually on what is most visible: destroyed cities, displaced populations, economic collapse, and human suffering. These are immediate, measurable, and morally urgent consequences. Much less attention is given to what happens inside universities, research institutes, and laboratories, even though these spaces represent another form of vulnerability.
According to UNESCO, hundreds of scientific institutions and universities in Ukraine have been damaged since the beginning of the war, with losses estimated in the billions. Thousands of researchers have been displaced, many projects have been interrupted indefinitely, and a significant part of the scientific community has been redirected toward survival, humanitarian response, or military-related work. These numbers, however, only describe the surface of the problem.
The deeper loss is structural, since a laboratory is not simply a physical space with equipment, but an accumulation of time. It may contain decades of environmental observations that depend on continuity, biological samples that cannot be replaced, specialised animal models that took years to develop, patient cohorts followed over long periods, unpublished datasets, and technical expertise that exists not in papers but in people. In certain fields, especially those involving long-term biological or environmental processes, interruption can mean permanent scientific loss. This results in the irreversible disappearance of entire lines of inquiry.
There are also cases beyond Ukraine that reflect similar patterns. During the conflict in Sudan, one of the world’s most important research centres dedicated to mycetoma, a chronic, progressively destructive infectious disease, was severely damaged, affecting decades of work on a neglected tropical disease that primarily impacts vulnerable populations with limited access to healthcare. In such cases, the loss of scientific infrastructure is also a loss of potential medical progress for communities that already face structural inequalities. More than destroying infrastructure, war disrupts continuity, one of the conditions on which science depends most deeply.
When Knowledge Becomes a Strategic Resource
At the same time, science today is increasingly connected to geopolitical competition. Fields such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, neuroscience, and quantum technologies retain strong civilian relevance, but they also attract strategic and military interest. Research that begins with medical or technological goals can later be adapted for surveillance systems, cyber capabilities, defence technologies, or information control systems.
This shift creates a new layer of vulnerability. Scientific knowledge is no longer only valuable because it advances understanding, but also because it can be strategically useful. This is where scientific espionage, intellectual property theft, cyberattacks on universities, and foreign interference in research environments become relevant issues. European institutions have repeatedly raised concerns about the increasing targeting of academic systems, not only for data but for technological expertise embedded within research groups.
Scientific collaboration is no longer only about sharing knowledge for collective progress. It can, in some cases, be used as a strategic way to outperform in war or geopolitical decisions.
What Would You Do
At this point, the dilemma returns to you. If you continue the collaboration, you may be seen as separating science from politics in the name of progress and human benefit. If you stop, you may be seen as aligning science with ethical responsibility and political accountability. If the project is delayed or abandoned, it may mean that potential treatments never reach patients who would have benefited from them.
There is no fully consistent answer that removes the tension between these positions. What makes the situation difficult is precisely that each option carries a different form of moral cost.
Science is often imagined as existing outside the instability of the world, but in reality, it depends on conditions that are deeply embedded within it, including trust, mobility, funding stability, institutional cooperation, and international exchange. War alters the environment in which science becomes possible, changing not only what is done but also what can be done.
The difficult question, then, is not whether science should be independent from socio-political conflict, because history suggests that it never truly has been. It is how much knowledge, collaboration, and future discovery societies are willing to lose when that conflict turns scientific cooperation into a moral decision, made not in textbooks or conferences, but in everyday scientific practice.