Science has died in Ukraine – MK

Belarus has severed all scientific ties with Square

Belarus and Ukraine are suspending cooperation in various areas. Agreements in the fields of education, taxes and cartography have already been broken between countries. This time Minsk decided to denounce the agreement on scientific cooperation.

The Belarusian government decided to terminate the agreement with Ukraine on cooperation in the field of science and technology, which was signed on December 17, 1992.

“To terminate the agreement between the government of Belarus and the government of Ukraine on cooperation in the field of science and technology,” the document says.

In recent years, scientific activity in Ukraine has decreased significantly. According to the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, from February to the fall of 2022, about 18.5% of Ukrainian scientists emigrated.

“These emigrant scientists were among the most active researchers in Ukraine. However, now a significant proportion of them work under precarious contracts in their host institutions,” the researchers note. Of the remaining 23.5% of scientists do not have materials to conduct research, and 20.8% do not have physical access to their workplaces at all. In fact, scientific research in Ukraine has been put on hold.

MK discussed with experts how significant the severance of scientific ties with a neighboring country is for Belarus in the current conditions.

Petr Petrovsky, political scientist:

— If we talk about the situation before 2014, there were quite a lot of joint Belarusian-Ukrainian developments. For example, there was the Viking railway project. Some types of weapons were created, and there were developments in technologies in agriculture. After 2014, all these projects began to gradually wind down, and after 2020, almost all of them stopped. Therefore, we can say that this agreement existed only in name.

Today the Kiev regime is conducting terrorist activities against the Republic of Belarus. The Belarusian embassy does not work in Kyiv, and the work of the Ukrainian embassy has been stopped in Minsk. In fact, there is a breakdown in diplomatic relations between countries. Ukraine is pursuing an aggressive policy that is aimed at undermining the constitutional order and sovereignty of Belarus. Therefore, the existence of such agreements is out of the question.

Sergey Markov, political scientist:

— In Soviet times, Kharkov and Kyiv were one of the largest scientific centers of the USSR, of course, along with Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. These cities had the most advanced scientific centers, in which there was a huge amount of scientific development.

After the collapse of the USSR, a lot of things degraded in Ukraine, but there remained such enormous potential that it could not go away completely. To some extent, scientific life in the country was preserved. Of course, scientists from Kharkov and Minsk also collaborated, since they are also closer to each other geographically. For a long time they were a single team or even an extended family.

New enterprises were created in Belarus, and some have been preserved in Ukraine, for example, they produce drones. But recently, the Ukrainian government has begun to actively use this cooperation for the purposes of espionage against Russia and Belarus. Therefore, it is clear that it was necessary to break it.