russia Continues Losing Its Brains

russian science has entered a systemic collapse, which accelerated after the start of full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The number of patents issued in the rf for scientific inventions and developments has decreased by 25% and fallen to its lowest level since the early 2000s. The official innovation statistics only masks the degradation: in 2025, russian companies announced the introduction of 2,725 “advanced technologies”, but only 10% of them were fundamentally new. The rest are secondary solutions that have long been tested outside russia and simply copied for domestic use.

The financial model also demonstrates a loss of scientific sovereignty. Since the beginning, domestic spending on research and development has not even reached 1% of GDP. At the same time, the rf spends 1.5% of GDP annually on importing the results of such work, and up to 2% when know-how is taken into account. In fact, the country invests more in purchasing foreign technologies than in its own science.

This decline is not sudden. russia’s exit from the Bologna System in 2022, coupled with international sanctions, cut russian scientists off from cooperation with the world’s leading scientific centers. Chronic underfunding and specialists’ leaving for abroad en mass have undermined the research base within the country. In response, the kremlin resorted to administrative pressure: employees of universities and research institutes were required to obtain approval for trips to scientific events in “unfriendly” countries. This list includes 49 countries, including the EU, G7 countries, and key scientific centers in East Asia, which effectively means isolation from almost all global science.

The consequences of the kremlin’s policy are reflected in global rankings. In Leiden University’s 2025 ranking of scientific activity, no russian university made it into the top 200. The highest position was taken by moscow state university, which ranked only 227th. It lost 12 positions in a year and 29 positions since 2021, confirming the rapid decline of the russian academic system.