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.

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.

The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic has sentenced philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. Zyuzev, who holds both Russian and Canadian citizenship, is one of the best-known scholars of the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. He left Russia after the war began, but in the summer of 2025 he returned to his native village in Komi [a republic in northwestern Russia — T-invariant], where he was arrested. According to the FSB, the scholar was training leaders of national liberation movements among Russia’s small Indigenous peoples and receiving funding for his project from foreign organizations. T-invariant looks at what Zyuzev worked on, why he kept coming back to Russia, and what his friends and colleagues make of the treason charges.

Oleg Zaslavskii has worked at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (KhNU) for almost forty years, studying general relativity, gravitation, and black hole physics. But two papers he coauthored with a Russian colleague who has spoken out against the war have cost him his funding. For ten months now, Zaslavskii has gone without a salary and has been unable to propose new research projects. In wartime, should sanctions policy take an individual’s stance into account — or does any interaction with someone from a Russian institution automatically count as cooperation with Russia?

Andrei Klepach — one of Russia’s leading economists and a high-ranking economic official of the Vladimir Putin era — has published several academic works over the past six years that are packed with cosmist imagery. His drift into “energy-information cosmism” went unnoticed until Klepach was fired as chief economist of the state corporation VEB.RF — after he publicly offered a bleak assessment of Russia’s ability to compete with the West and with Ukraine. T-invariant traced the economist’s academic evolution into a cosmist and looked into the background of his mentor on the road “toward a cosmoplanetary civilization.” It also turned out that, even after Klepach’s dismissal, VEB.RF has no shortage of people developing alternative “theories of everything”: the “wave hypothesis of life,” the idea of a “Fifth Russia,” and a “noosphere economy.”

On July 23, the U.S. Department of Defense published a new list of organizations it considers a potential threat to U.S. national security. The list includes Moscow State University (MSU), Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the Higher School of Economics (HSE), Ural Federal University, and several other Russian universities and research institutes. American scholars and universities receiving Pentagon funding are advised to terminate cooperation with these institutions. T-invariant examines how this new list differs from sanctions laws and what consequences it may bear for Russian and American science.

Exactly 35 years ago, on August 21, 1991, the coup attempt by the self-proclaimed State Committee on the State of Emergency collapsed. The Soviet Union itself had four more months to live, but after those three days in August, a completely different life began for millions of Soviet citizens. The changes touched everyone, but scientists were among those whose old lives fell apart especially fast — and on the ruins, new ones began to take shape. Institutes were left without money or staff, and entire fields of research lost their funding. Yet at the same time, the borders opened, and it became possible to work at universities and research centers abroad. Some left for a few months and never came back; others emigrated right away. How did these scientists discover the world of Western science? What did they have to go through? What did it cost them? And why did a temporary departure turn out to be permanent for so many of them? T-invariant presents the stories of how they left and the new lives they built.