Twenty-seven-year-old Moscow mathematician Semyon Krasotkin is accused of high treason. Investigators allege that he sent paid reactions worth a total of 2,200 rubles to Ukrainian and Russian opposition Telegram channels. According to Krasotkin’s relatives, FSB officers beat him and tortured him with electric shocks after he was detained. His is not the only such case: human rights defenders are already aware of 11 criminal prosecutions over Telegram Stars. T-invariant tells Semyon Krasotkin’s story and examines how ordinary reactions in a messenger app can become grounds for criminal prosecution.

The latest period in Russian literature, which evidently began on February 24, 2022, just as it did in education and science, has so far received little systematic study. There are, of course, more and more conference papers and articles on individual authors and phenomena, and conferences now bring together dozens of specialists. Clearly, systematic book-length studies of this period’s literature can only be published outside Russia, and foreign scholars are helping make them possible. Some of them have taken on the painstaking work of tracking every significant new release and translating and analyzing these texts. One of them, French literary scholar Antoine Nicolle, recently defended his doctoral dissertation, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. It is effectively the first attempt to systematically map the part of Russian literature usually described as anti-war or oppositional. T-invariant asked Nicolle how a scholar who started out as a Rimbaud specialist got hooked on contemporary Russian literature, how that literature has responded to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the suffering it has brought to that country, and what “being Russian” means for Russian writers today.

The “forced digital detox” delivered by Ukraine’s Armed Forces has hit the most profitable part of Yandex’s business: search and AI. The long-term fallout from the attacks on the company’s data centers has yet to be assessed, but supercomputing experts consulted by T-invariant are confident that all three of its supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin — were badly damaged by fire and smoke. Soot and ash may have reached the machines’ microelectronics through their direct free-cooling systems, which use outside air. In the best case, cleaning them will take many months; in the worst, Yandex will have to buy new, extremely scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents, which will take years. The company owns Russia’s best supercomputers, which, according to its financial reports, had recently become key drivers of its growth. On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the global Top500 list of supercomputers, competing with leading systems from the US, China, Japan, and Germany. After the Ukrainian drone strikes, Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the performance of its top supercomputers as early as November.

Russian mathematics is losing ground, scientists are leaving, and international ties are fraying — yet the government’s new Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 presents all of this almost as a force of nature. The number of researchers has “declined,” access to global science has been “restricted,” and the country’s competitive edge is at risk of being “lost.” Who restricted what, where the scientists went, and why Russia is losing influence, the document hardly explains. T-invariant read the Concept and found a striking picture: global mathematics appears in it as something like a warehouse to which access must be “ensured” — preferably along with additional funding.

T-invariant presents the latest regular report Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 37, dated September 30, 2026. The Russian government has approved the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036. One of the key issues the Concept highlights is restricted access to international scientific and technical information. Below, we briefly comment on what access to foreign journals looks like today and what is at stake.

We, the members of the Russian-American Science Association (RASA), strongly condemn the drone attack on the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine which caused serious damage and, according to reports, resulted in casualties.

Research institutes and universities across Russia are keeping blacklists of their own staff. T-invariant has identified two patterns of pressure on scientists and faculty: they are summoned for “conversations” with FSB officers, or they are left without work when an expiring contract is quietly not renewed.

Our interviewee today is not allowed to give interviews — under the terms of her employment contract. The senior position she holds at an American university obliges her not to make her political views public and to exercise the utmost caution in public statements. But the changes now taking place at American universities are so far-reaching that she agreed to talk with T-invariant about the serious challenges facing higher education. Her experience as a department chair and dean, and later as a vice president, helps her today to map the critical points in the development of the academic environment: how the new presidential administration is affecting university life, how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has split it, how artificial intelligence is influencing teaching and its administration, what the shrinking of university budgets leads to, and, most importantly, how the very logic by which higher education works has changed.

Russian-American Science Association strongly condemns the decision of the Russian authorities to designate our colleague Tatiana Tatarinova, a distinguished bioinformatics scholar and professor at the University of La Verne, as a “foreign agent.”

Since the start of the full-scale war, Russian science has lost key ties with Western universities and research centers. Yet four years of sanctions have not led to a collapse. Instead, Russia rapidly reoriented toward China, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East, while the Kremlin firmly integrated higher education into its system of military priorities. These are the conclusions reached by Olga Orlova, head of T-invariant, in her report Transformation of Science and Education in Russia under Sanctions 2022–2026, which examines changes in Russian academia over the past four years.

Renowned American legal scholar Austin Sarat, a founder of the humanistic study of law, on the responsibility of public intellectuals in the United States, the bracing “slap in the face” Trump dealt to universities, and the path forward in defending academic freedom and democracy.

T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36, dated August 31, 2026. Azat Miftakhov has published a paper in the French quarterly La Revue de la filière mathématiques (June–August 2026). The paper was written at the suggestion of French mathematician Bernard Randé, a member of the journal’s editorial board and of the international association Solidarité FreeAzat. Miftakhov completed the work while held in prison in Dimitrovgrad.