The first time I spoke with Olga Shpak, I made the mistake of beginning as I often do when interviewing researchers: by asking for some basic biographical information. “I used to be a scientist,” she said, not sounding bitter, only a bit nostalgic. Now, she clarified, she’s a war volunteer.
Shpak built a storied career studying Arctic and sub-Arctic marine mammals as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her work inspired some of Russia’s most significant whale conservation measures over the last decade, including protections for bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk, an Alaska-sized body of water on the country’s Pacific coast. But in February last year, just as Vladimir Putin prepared to invade her home country of Ukraine, Shpak abruptly left, ultimately saying goodbye to her life in Russia—and the whales.
“There were relatively very few projects in Russia aimed at actually protecting marine mammals, rather than exploiting them,” Phil Clapham, a retired biologist and a leading expert on large whales, told me. “And with Olga’s loss to the war, they lost one of the absolute—probably the best one of all.”
Today, Shpak is working near the front lines of the war, helping nonprofit aid groups supply civilians and soldiers with everything from underwear and tourniquets to drones, wood-burning stoves, and pickup trucks. When we spoke, bomb sirens blared in the background, a numbingly routine occurrence for Shpak, who told me her focus had been entirely consumed by the war effort. “To do science you have to concentrate,” she said. “You have to kind of put your brain in a certain mode. And that switch is broken.”
Shpak is one of thousands of researchers whose life’s work has been set adrift by the war, as she and her peers have been forced to flee the region or stay and fight. International collaborations with Russian institutions have been put on hold, and scientists around the globe tell me they’ve abandoned or modified projects, canceled conferences, forgone necessary supplies, or lost funding. Even the world’s biggest scientific endeavors haven’t been spared: In early 2022, for instance, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, said it would “not engage in new collaborations” with Russia “until further notice.” Similarly, after being sanctioned by the United States, European Union, and Canada, Russia said last year that it planned to leave the International Space Station when its current agreement ends in 2024, meaning the program would lose one of its principal members. (In late April, Russia backtracked, saying it would stick around through 2028.)
