The European Union's sanctions regime against Russian science

Abstract

Unprecedented unilateral restrictive measures against Russia's participation in international scientific and technical cooperation (scientific sanctions) have become an integral part of the modern European sanctions policy. The subject of the article is the EU sanctions regime against Russian science, which implements an appropriate policy aimed at ending the participation of Russian scientific institutions and organizations in projects implemented within the framework of EU scientific programs. The purpose of the article is to reveal the content and model of the EU sanctions regime against Russian science. The hypothesis of the study is the position that the model of the sectoral sanctions regime under consideration combines general and specific points. The article argues that the specified sectoral sanctions regime of the EU is autonomous in nature and does not represent something derived from scientific sanctions imposed by member States. General scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, abstraction and generalization were used. This made it possible to move from diverse empirical data to theoretical generalizations about the nature and model of the EU sanctions regime against Russian science. In addition, historical and comparative approaches were used, as well as a modeling method. The article substantiates the conclusion about the contradictory nature of the value and legal foundations of this regime, which is reflected in the lack of unity of views of European expert circles regarding the degree of rupture of scientific ties with Russia. The author substantiates that the massive and, by historical standards, sudden introduction of scientific sanctions in 2022, forming a special sanctions regime, is not the result of certain difficulties that occurred earlier in Russian-European scientific cooperation. On the contrary, it is a systematically motivated destruction of the bridges of scientific diplomacy created after the Cold War. A negative consequence of the functioning of this regime was a decrease in the degree of internationalization of Russian science and its ability to contribute not only to solving applied problems of national socio-economic development, but also to solving global problems of our time. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in the scientific literature, structural subsystems of the EU scientific sanctions regime are identified, as well as their additional identification features are characterized.