Ukraine Scientists Began Leaving Long Before the 2022 Invasion

TWO days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the hashtag ScienceForUkraine was already mobilizing researchers worldwide to help colleagues stranded by the fighting. A new study of Ukraine’s scientific publishing records finds that the global scramble arrived years too late to catch the real story. Scholars in the regions Russia occupied or annexed in 2014 had been leaving for other parts of the country and for institutions abroad ever since, and the places that emptied fastest were often the country’s best-connected research hubs, not its poorest corners.

Every scientific paper carries an institutional address, and millions of those addresses, filed year after year, sketch a rough map of who works where and when they move. Aliakbar Akbaritabar at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Michael Zaslavsky at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used that map for an observational bibliometric analysis of Ukraine-affiliated researchers from 2009 to 2022, a population that grew from just under 10,000 actively publishing scholars in 2009 to slightly under 35,000 in 2019. Then the counting frays at the edges: a decline of more than 70 percent through 2022, part genuine exit from publishing, part incomplete coverage of the newest years.

Reading Migration in the Publication Record

Their main source is OpenAlex, a public index of scholarly publications that records an author’s institutional affiliation on every paper it indexes. A move only counts once a scholar’s most common affiliation for the year has shifted and stayed shifted, with publication activity observed across two distinct years, a cautious threshold built to catch settled relocations rather than sabbaticals, visiting posts or conference-driven address churn. The shifts fold into net migration rates: how many more scholars left a region than arrived, per 1,000 actively publishing scholars there that year, tracked for each oblast and separately again for moves inside Ukraine and moves across its borders. Gaps in a scholar’s publication output are handled with a two-year backward fill, an approach inherited from the Scholarly Migration Database toolkit that pioneered this way of counting.

The three years after Russia annexed Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas in 2014 are stark. For every 1,000 actively publishing scholars, about 54 more left Donetsk than arrived, headed mostly for other parts of Ukraine, and about 46 more left Luhansk on the same internal road. International moves bit harder still: a net loss of roughly 117 per 1,000 in Crimea, 66 in Donetsk, and 313 in Sevastopol, the steepest of all. Those figures line up almost exactly with the ones the Max Planck Institute put in its own announcement of the paper. What the announcement left out is the part the researchers found hardest to explain.

Launch Pads, Not Magnets

“We expected more developed regions to retain their own researchers and attract new ones,” says Zaslavsky. “Instead, we found that they could also be places from which scholars were better able to relocate.” Regions with more university infrastructure and stronger outside ties, in other words, did not act like magnets so much as launch pads. The finding inverts the usual brain-gain story: a developed region turns out to be a place scholars are better equipped to leave.

The statistical backbone is a set of negative binomial regressions run on 20 oblasts and 277 region-year observations, with pre-2014 Lviv as the reference region, and relative to Lviv the conflict’s fingerprint falls more heavily on international flows than internal ones, landing unevenly across the map. Kyiv City, the country’s scientific center of gravity, saw both arrivals and departures rise after 2014, reading as a hub absorbing scholars from occupied regions while sending its own abroad. Luhansk went the other way: international in-migration dropped, which fits, given it is the easternmost province, a place particularly dangerous to move into. One quirk in the arithmetic deserves a plain explanation, because the study treats Crimea and Sevastopol as Ukrainian throughout, so scholars holding Russian affiliations who took posts at Crimean institutions after the annexation register as international in-migrants, which is why the peninsula shows elevated arrivals alongside its departures, a bidirectional churn rather than a one-way drain. And in counterfactual models that extrapolate the occupied regions’ pre-war economic trends, development looked set to lift internal mobility overall, a relationship the conflict suppressed.

Universities That Picked Up and Left

The institutions moved, too. Fourteen higher education institutions physically relocated out of occupied or annexed territories between 2014 and 2022, five from Luhansk, eight from Donetsk and one from Crimea, according to mapping by Finikov and colleagues, and a university that picks up and leaves rarely brings its whole workforce along. Each move likely meant scholars uprooted their lives or lost their jobs outright.

The method has real blind spots. It cannot see a scholar who wanted to leave but could not, and it can undercount one who kept a Ukrainian affiliation on the books while quietly building a career abroad. The window also closes in 2022, so the full-scale invasion appears only as the story’s final, incomplete year of a war that has since compressed combat to machine speed. The authors are careful that the associations cannot be interpreted causally.

That longer story matters for the postwar reckoning. Earlier estimates put the share of Ukrainian scientists who left the country after February 2022 somewhere between 5 and 20 percent, with the most research-active the most likely to go, a pattern a survey of more than 2,500 Ukrainian scientists bore out at the high end of the range. A science system that sheds people this way loses more than headcount, because researchers carry collaborations and networks that rarely survive a move intact, and the physical toll compounds it: UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has priced the restoration of Ukraine’s damaged public scientific infrastructure at more than 1.26 billion dollars. Whether they circle back is the question Ukraine’s scientific recovery most depends on, and the answer will be written in affiliations that do not exist yet.

Regular monitoring of affiliation changes, the authors argue, would give Ukrainian science policy a cheap early-warning system for exactly this kind of erosion, provided it is paired with surveys and administrative records that can see the people bibliometrics cannot. Multiplied across tens of thousands of careers, a line of institutional bookkeeping is turning into one of the clearer pictures anyone has of what war does to a country’s capacity for science.

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