A message to the EGI Community and its scientists

We have all been following the unfolding aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine with apprehension and horror, witnessing an escalation of violence and life-threatening actions targeting innocents and civilians every day. The brutality of this aggression is shaking the continuity of international scientific collaborations relying on a long history of trust in the scientific community. 

With the start of the aggression, Ukrainian universities have been the target of military actions, and the computing infrastructure at the National Science Centre of the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology is now wholly lost. We have no information about our colleagues working there. The brutality of the invasion is unacceptable and is challenging scientific work and international collaboration that we are mandated to support.

From the inception of EGI, partners from the Russian Federation and Ukraine have been united by their mission of contributing with their national academic and research computing facilities to support cross-country scientific computing and data processing. Together, they actively reinforced the connections between science and technology for scientific excellence and joined forces with many other facilities in the world. 

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the unjustified military aggression against Ukraine as an independent democratic country. At the same time, we trust science to remain an effective instrument of peace, and the EGI federating services have been our contribution to this end. They have been connecting data centres across national borders for more than a decade. In the name of all scientists who believe in peace, the EGI Executive Board has decided to keep this bridge open to Russian Federation-based facilities to let freedom, openness and peace prevail. 

Scientific collaborations and the data centres of the federation will retain the power to restrict access to services that are deployed in the EGI infrastructure to enforce their specific authorization policies.

We call for all scientists - from Russia and any other country - to stand up for peace in Ukraine and support the use of democratic means to preserve it. 

Read about the set-up of the EGI crisis team and other information about our practical response here.