The Russian attack on Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences on Monday dealt a serious blow to the country’s pre-eminent research institution, a recent center of wartime innovation that is also responsible for almost every major Ukrainian civilian discovery of the past century.
Scientists affiliated with the academy have contributed to recent discoveries in the fields of astronomy and medicine and have been instrumental in developing new military technologies, including drones and enhanced armor for vehicles.
Academics from Ukraine and around the world on Tuesday condemned the strike by a jet-powered drone, which caused the academy’s headquarters in Kyiv to partly collapse and become engulfed in flames, killing at least two people and injuring several others.
“Science has become a target. And the world has seen it,” the academy said in a statement on Tuesday. “There can be no ‘science is above politics’ when science is under armed attacks.”
It was not immediately clear if the academy had been intentionally targeted. The building is neara data center maintained by a large telecommunications and internet provider, UKRtelecom. Such facilities have recently come under frequent Russian attack.
“It’s more of a symbol that the Russians want to destroy,” said Mark Omelchenko, 26, a Kyiv resident near the burned building on Tuesday. “But I don’t think this will destroy science. ”
Academic institutions have not been spared since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. A recent study found that by 2025, one-third of Ukrainian universities had been damaged by military action, while more than 10 places of higher education had been destroyed. Around 7,500 academics and researchers have been displaced or migrated and hundreds of others have been killed.
The academy has played a central role in the country’s scientific achievement. According to an official history, more than 90 percent of the nation’s scientific discoveries have been attributed to the academy, which was established in 1918, cementing its reputation as a powerhouse of civilian research. Across about 170 satellite institutes in the country, it employs around 16,000 researchers.
In 2025, Vyacheslav Bogdanov, the academy’s vice president, said the institute was increasingly involved with clandestine military research.
Much of that defense work has revolved around Ukraine’s drone program: autonomous software designed to detect and track hostile drones, internal navigation technology that doesn’t rely on map details from global positioning satellites, artificial intelligence that allows countless drones to act as a cohesive swarm and a cutting-edge training center for drone pilots.
But academy researchers have also made recent discoveries in astronomy, medicine and materials science.
Its astronomers have used machine learning to identify rare types of galaxies. They have also joined forces with NASA and its James Webb Space Telescope to peer at ancient starry whirlpools that existed shortly after the Big Bang. This work has been critical to understanding how the universe evolved over billions of years.
Material science researchers have employed 3-D printing technology to design new materials for use in regenerative medicine. And physicists have teamed up with colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider to offer up tantalizing hints of an exotic mix of hypothesized particles.
The academy has also developed methods to produce synthetic diamonds and materials for use in industry and scientific research, forged technology that makes it easier to weld things in outer space and built giant radio telescopes designed to eavesdrop on the distant whispers of the cosmos.
Scientists and engineers who are used to focusing on civilian research have been asked to apply their expertise to military applications.
Geophysicists, who use things like seismic waves to probe Earth’s interior, have been devising tools that can remotely and autonomously detect explosive ordinance. Materials scientists, who may conjure up ways to build more resilient bridges, buildings and vehicles, have been put to work developing high-fragmentation artillery shells. Nuclear physicists, normally used to interrogating tiny particles, have found novel ways to enhance the shielding on military vehicles.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian ambassador to Britain and former commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, lamented the Russian drone strike in a social media post. “I knew every corner of this building, where the finest minds of our science and intelligentsia worked,” he wrote. “People close to me lost their lives.”
The war has driven some of the country’s research underground, literally. The country’s science ministry has built subterranean laboratories so that its engineers can continue to work in relative safety, while lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic have meant that many experts — and students — are now masters at working, and collaborating, remotely.
In its statement, the academy said that although its headquarters were severely damaged, its walls were still standing: “The academy, established over a century ago alongside with Ukrainian statehood, has endured. It will endure this time as well.”
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