Nuclear research Cern ends collaboration with institutes from Russia and Belarus

The cooperation agreement between the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) and Russia and Belarus will be terminated on Saturday as announced. The move is a reaction to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.

There are currently fewer than 350 scientists affiliated with a Russian institute, and most of them do not even live in Geneva. The decision of the Cern member states concerns cooperation with Russian institutes, according to an inquiry by the Keystone-SDA news agency. Relations with Russian scientists associated with Cern under other agreements will continue.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the 24 Cern member states decided in December 2023 to end their cooperation with Russian research institutes. The decision had already been announced in March and June 2022.

Cern (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, is a large-scale facility for basic physics research and is located near Geneva, partly on Swiss and partly on French soil. Research is conducted into the structure of matter with the help of large particle accelerators. Cern is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

Scientists from over 100 countries

With around 3,000 employees and an annual budget (2023) of 1.3 billion Swiss francs, Cern is the world's largest research center in the field of particle physics. According to Arnaud Marsollier from Cern, around 17,000 guest scientists from 110 countries work on experiments - although most of them work in laboratories at other institutes and in other countries.

The absence of scientists from institutes in Russia will be noticeable, said Marsollier. But Cern will be able to make up for this. After all, Russia was never a member state, but had a special status as an observer state, meaning it did not contribute to the annual budget and had no decision-making rights. The number of scientists from Belarus has always been small.

SDA