On Feb. 24, 2022, the Russian government started a criminal war against its peaceful neighbor, Ukraine, that has resulted in countless innocent lives lost. We express our unequivocal opposition to this war and demand immediate and complete removal of Russian troops from the sovereign Ukrainian territory. We also demand bringing those responsible for the aggression to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. We express our full solidarity with colleagues in Ukraine and encourage research institutions around the world to explore every possibility for increasing cooperation with Ukrainian scientists and opening doors to students from Ukraine. We also express our sincere admiration of those colleagues in Russia who protest against this criminal war, while knowing that they can be put behind bars for just expressing a disagreement with the actions of the Russian government. We encourage all research institutions to support these brave scientists and help them as much as they possibly can.
We encourage all physicists, particularly the Russian-speaking ones, to confront the Orwellian propaganda broadcast by the Russian TV and radio stations and spread by Russian internet trolls, as your voices can make difference.
We have relatives and friends in Russia, whom we love and deeply care about. We are proud to descend from the nation of Landau and Tolstoy, Sakharov and Akhmatova, Ginzburg and Tchaikovsky, Shubnikov and Brodsky, Kapitza and Dostoevsky. Not the nation of Stalin and Putin. We are having a difficult time accepting the fact that the very country that lost millions of its citizens in the WW2 is now copying the behavior of the regime that it paid such a dear price to defeat. We believe that it is our responsibility to form a unified and unequivocal opposition to this war.
We encourage our colleagues to make their voice heard and sign this open letter.
To the people of Ukraine – we are with you.
Andrey Chubukov, University of Minnesota
Leonid Levitov, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dmitrii Maslov, University of Florida
Natalia Perkins, University of Minnesota
Oleg Starykh, University of Utah