Each year, the organization Scholars at Risk (SAR) releases the Free to Think report, which acts as a global barometer for academic freedom. The latest edition, published on October 1, 2025, highlights a troubling trend: since 2018, declines in academic freedom metrics have emerged not just in autocracies but also in long-established democracies. The report, covering July 2024 to June 2025, documents 395 attacks worldwide. Although the total numbers show only a modest increase from the previous year, incidents threatening the physical safety of students and faculty have nearly doubled.

Over the course of two years, several thousand scientists left Russia, sometimes entire teams were evacuated. Some of them managed not only to survive, but to be reborn in a new reality. In February 2024, the Agency for Control and Quality Assurance of Higher Education of Montenegro decided on state accreditation of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLASH), which was created by former employees of the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. Teodora Shanin. And this is not the only example of how fugitive Russians are reassembling academic projects.

Has Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow broken the «negative equilibrium» Russia has been stuck in for the last twenty years? Vladimir Gelman, political scientist, professor at the University of Helsinki, and author of the book on «bad governance» in contemporary Russia, analyzes the consequences of the failed mutiny and possible alternative scenarios.

Charles University opens a Master’s program in Russian. Why it was in demand amidst the war, explains Zhanna Nemtsova, co-director of the Boris Nemtsov Academic Center at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.