Centre for Civic Education (CCE) points out that the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts (MASA) still has among its members Viktor Sadovnichiy, Rector of Lomonosov Moscow State University, a long-standing associate of Vladimir Putin and the initiator of a letter by rectors of Russian universities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sadovnichiy has been a foreign member of MASA since 6 December 1996, and he is still listed among the members of the Department of Natural Sciences on MASA’s official website.
CCE recalls that it previously pointed out that academician Dragan Vukčević, Head of MASA’s Lexicographic Centre, participated in September 2024 in Moscow in a session of the Council of the International Association of Academies of Sciences (IAAS), which is closely connected with the regimes in Moscow and Minsk. Among the speakers at that gathering, in addition to sanctioned officials such as Dmitry Mezentsev and Mikhail Kovalchuk, was Viktor Sadovnichiy. In other words, a MASA academician shared the stage in Moscow with a foreign member of his own Academy, one of the most prominent advocates of Putin’s regime within the Russian academic community.
Sadovnichiy, a mathematician born in Ukraine, has headed Moscow State University since 1992. Since 2002, he has been a member of Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, and a member of its Supreme Council, while in 2003 he was elected to the State Duma as the lead candidate on that party’s Moscow list, but gave up his parliamentary mandate. During the presidential elections in Russia in 2012, 2018 and 2024, he was officially registered as an authorised representative of presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, while in 2018 he was a member of the initiative group that nominated Putin’s candidacy for president and was again included on the list of his authorised representatives. The following year, the State Duma adopted an amendment allowing the President to reappoint the rectors of Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University an unlimited number of times, thereby placing Sadovnichiy’s tenure directly in the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Following the start of the Russian aggression in 2022, Sadovnichiy was the initiator of a letter by rectors of Russian universities supporting the invasion of Ukraine. He has been under Ukrainian sanctions since June 2022, and because of his support for the aggression, universities in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Dnipro stripped him of honorary doctorates. According to available information, Sadovnichiy is not on the list of persons against whom Montenegro applies restrictive measures, which further highlights MASA’s responsibility to clearly take a position on the actions of its foreign member.
Sadovnichiy was elected to MASA long before he became Putin’s authorised electoral representative and a public advocate of the war, while, according to MASA’s Statute, membership in the Academy is lifelong. However, lifelong membership does not imply an obligation on the Academy to remain silent about the actions of its members. Ukrainian universities imposed concrete consequences because of his support for the aggression, while the pan-European academy Academia Europaea, in March 2022, unanimously suspended his membership, condemning in the strongest terms the statement in which, as President of the Russian Union of Rectors, he supported “Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine”. However, even after more than four years of war, MASA has not publicly taken a position on the fact that the initiator of that letter is among its members. Such an approach is difficult to reconcile with the declared support that MASA has expressed for Ukraine, as well as with Montenegro’s foreign policy orientation, which is aligned with the foreign and security policy of the European Union. In addition, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), of which MASA is a member, suspended the membership of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus in 2022.
The continued membership of a person who publicly supported aggression against a sovereign European state, without any public distancing by MASA from his positions and actions, raises serious questions about MASA’s credibility and sends the message that support for war has no consequences for one’s status within Montenegro’s academic community, consequently undermining Montenegro’s international reputation.
CCE calls on MASA to publicly and unequivocally distance itself from the positions and actions of its foreign member Viktor Sadovnichiy and to consider amendments to its Statute that would allow for the termination of membership in cases of public support for aggression, war crimes or other serious violations of international law. At the same time, we reiterate our call on academician Dragan Vukčević to relinquish his membership in the IAAS, as well as on MASA to clearly distance itself from this compromised association and terminate institutional cooperation with it.
Sara Čabarkapa, Active Citizenship Programme Coordinator