>>4605
The sad truth about science in Russia is that Putin cannot allow clever people in any position of power, and Russian science is therefore dead anyways.
Back in early 2020 when Bernd still worked for an university, he did a lot of research into the Russian "crackdown" on scientists and wrote a long article about it for a major German news publication. Some here might remember Russian scientists being accused of treason, their institutes being raided by police, etc. Few people know the regime had also instituted lots of new rules for contacts between scientists and foreigners in August of 2019, like every meeting now having to be registered with the government, scientists having to provide written notes about what was talked about, and foreigners no longer being allowed to bring any electronic device with a possible recording function (including smartwatches) into Russian institutes. It took months to repel these rules, and I guess they might be back in effect now.
This already started happening two and a half years before Putin invaded Ukraine, in a clear attempt to silence everybody intelligent enough to maybe become a danger to his system, either by potentially opposing him politically or because they would destroy the system from within if he accepted their power and pulled them into his ranks (intelligent people understand there's no point in pointless violence, but a Mafia system is built only on pointless violence). So they made up fake espionage charges and such and cleansed whole academic departments. Stalin did the exact same thing e.g. to Andrei Tupolev in 1937.
I know it's easy to fool oneself into believing Russia must still be the academic power it was decades ago, but what I describe here was just the end of the development. Everybody truly capable of something has either left the country or become a victim of the regime by now. The remaining workforce is plagued by plagiarism (no pun intended) to an extreme degree. Whole engineering departments even at companies like Sukhoi (military planes) have been found out to have obtained fake degrees. Multiple of the prestigious Russian universities are at the top of the worst offenders worldwide when it comes to plagiarism. Instead of fixing the issue, Russia has been trying to shut down internet platforms tracking this, like DisserNet, for years - probably because many top politicians including Putin (he is accused of having plagiarised whole pages from an English economy book for his dissertation) are part of the problem.
Sorry for the TL;DR. Your post just made me remember all of this, and I find it truly, uttlery sad.