V.E. Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics NAS of Ukraine
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

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Hero city

Kharkiv was Ukraine’s science hotbed until Russia attacked. The crippled city refuses to give up

By Richard Stone

KHARKIV, UKRAINEIn an SUV pockmarked by shrapnel, Mykola Shulga wends his way along the Kharkiv highway, dodging concrete barriers and antitank obstacles scattered along the road like giant toy jacks. On the northern outskirts of his broken city, he reaches the ruins of Pyatykhatky, an academic enclave set amid oak and maple groves. “This was one of the most beautiful areas of Kharkiv,” he says, on a brisk October day. Before the war, it was home to many researchers at Ukraine’s largest science center, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT). But months of shelling left some of the district’s apartment blocks uninhabitable. Shulga, a theoretical physicist and KIPT’s director-general, gets quiet as the SUV passes a rubble pile where Pyatykhatky’s hospital once stood. “They also destroyed the primary school,” he says....

Read full article by the link below:

Richard Stone (2022). Hero city: Crippled by Russian attacks, Ukraine’s science hotbed refuses to give up. Science, 378, 6624, pp. 1036 – 1041. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg1895

Download pdf at https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adg1493