In 2026, scientists who signed the open anti-war letter in 2022 began to be summoned again for talks with the FSB. According to the interviewees, more than 8,500 Russian-speaking scientists signed the anti-war letter at the time, and in winter 2024 the security service had already been summoning signatories en masse and threatening some with criminal cases.
A scientist from the Urals was asked by an FSB officer attached to the university about his attitude toward the war then and now, and was shown a printout of the letter from the Wayback Machine archive. According to the scientist, the security officer had on his desk a list of seven surnames of employees from different universities in the city. A female employee of a Siberian research institute was summoned at Moscow’s request and was asked who sent her the link to the letter and to whom she forwarded it.
Interviewees from regional universities say that in the past a signature on the letter had no consequences for them for more than four years. According to them, this practice is most widespread at St. Petersburg State University, where Oleg Shaydulin, the former head of the political department of St. Petersburg’s Center “E”, a unit of the Interior Ministry for countering extremism, serves as deputy vice-rector for security.
Several former university employees said they were refused contract renewals after ending up on a blacklist. One of the interviewees called this internal system a “traffic light”: employees are divided into yellow and red lists. According to one of the scientists, one can get off the list by removing the signature, donating money to the state fund supporting war participants “Defenders of the Fatherland”, or becoming a lecturer for the Znanie society.
Another source told the publication about similar refusals to renew contracts at the St. Petersburg Higher School of Economics and the European University in St. Petersburg.
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