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“Mathematics Is a Live Performance.” Misha Verbitsky on Intelligent Mold, Non-Consensus Realities, and Aesthetics as the Last Refuge of Human Reason

In June 2026, the mathematician Misha Verbitsky ended up in an Armenian jail, caught in the automatic machinery of intergovernmental agreements that Russia has pressed into service for political persecution. Starting from that story of police and politics, his conversation with T-invariant editor Alexander Sergeev turns steadily more philosophical. How is polarization destroying scientific unity? Why doesn’t a powerful intellect protect anyone from insane ideas? And how does the “intelligent mold” of AI call into question both human cognitive exceptionalism and the value of mathematical truth, returning us to first principles — the joy of communication and pure aesthetics?

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

“Flagged”: A Convention Abused

With Russia’s war against Ukraine grinding on, Armenia has a reputation as an excellent place for people from Russia and from the world beyond the former Soviet space to meet. Pashinyan’s pro-Western course, the country’s pointed friendliness toward Russians who have relocated there, and direct flights to and from Russia all create the impression of a protected zone. That is why Yerevan was chosen for a reunion of alumni of Moscow’s School No. 57, an elite math-and-physics school. For Misha Verbitsky, who works in Brazil, these are close friends — almost a second family. But the illusion of safety dissolved at passport control: instead of a reunion with his classmates, three days went by in a police cell at the airport.

T-invariant: So you had no worries at all before the flight?

Misha Verbitsky: None — and that was a mistake, obviously. I should have been more careful. On arrival, right there at passport control, there’s a long, drawn-out fuss; then they walk you down corridors for quite a while and hand you over to the police. The police slap handcuffs on me, march me off somewhere far away again, and inform me that I’m being held for three days, then there’s a court hearing, and then I’ll spend another 30 days waiting to be deported to Russia.

T-i: Where were you held?

MV: Right there in the airport, in a small cell with bars on it. They kept saying an investigator was on his way. That went on for about six hours.

T-i: If there’s an investigator, doesn’t there have to be a lawyer too?

MV: No. No lawyer was part of the plan. The investigator never showed up either. But those particular officers were fairly kind to me and let me use my cell phone. I didn’t call anyone, I just fired off a message. Pretty soon my wife came rushing over, along with some classmates. And they brought a lawyer — the wonderful Vache Simonyan, who was a huge help to us. He explained afterward how it works: they hold you for 72 hours with no investigator and no lawyer, waiting for Russia to confirm whether it actually wants the person. Russia then has to supply court documents for the extradition to proceed. After three days the court rules, and the ruling is almost always the same: another 30–40 days behind bars while the full set of paperwork arrives from Russia. Then the court checks whether Armenian law contains any provision criminalizing whatever the person is being extradited for. Along the way — during the first 15 days — you can apply for refugee status, provided you have a lawyer. I actually managed to file, just in case. It doesn’t help much, though: you still can’t leave Armenia, and there’s a fair chance you’ll be locked up anyway.

T-i: Did they present anything? Any grounds?

MV: Well, they had a criminal charge written down there.

T-i: That was everything anyone knew for three days? No signals from Russia?

MV: Russia verbally demanded that I be held pending extradition and promised to send the official request later. But no fully formal demand ever arrived. Normally the Armenians respond favorably to an informal request like that and detain the person. They didn’t do that with me, because a big fuss blew up. Formally, Armenia did everything by the book — after all, Russia failed to produce the documents on time.

T-i: And Russia Day (June 12) [Russia’s national holiday — T-invariant] fell on a Friday. Did the long weekend help you?

MV: Absolutely! They were all just off drinking.

My sense is that they weren’t especially invested in nailing me. Somebody snitched, a case got opened… There isn’t really any purpose behind it. This enormous machine runs more or less on its own, without thinking about anyone in particular. One little cog turns, catches on another… Or maybe not… Because back in early 2024, a whole batch of articles came out in Russia attacking the math department [at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, where Verbitsky taught — T-invariant] and me personally. It was a smear campaign against the people there who were, let’s say, politically unreliable. The wording was hilarious: supposedly I had founded some sort of “club of Russia-haters.”

T-i: Did the noise in the press and in the community actually help?

MV: Oh, “help” is putting it mildly — it saved me. Because once they let me out after 72 hours, there was still a risk of getting stranded. They handed me a paper saying they had no claims against me, but I was still red-flagged. Meaning that at a border crossing, in the best case they simply don’t let me through, and in the worst the handcuffs come back out. And for ordinary people — I was in a privileged position — there’s only one solution: wait for a “humanitarian corridor.” That’s when, at the request of human rights organizations or the ombudsman, the border guards briefly lower the red flag that’s keeping you from crossing. Then you have to drive to Georgia immediately — you can’t buy a plane ticket in advance, since nobody knows when the border will open up.

T-i: What is this flag, exactly, and what database is it in? People mentioned the Chișinău Convention. Does it have anything to do with Interpol?

MV: No, no. Back in 2002 the CIS countries [the Commonwealth of Independent States, the post-Soviet bloc — T-invariant] drew up a convention on sharing judicial data and handing over criminals. Interestingly, Russia formally joined it only in 2023. And Chișinău itself — that is, Moldova — isn’t a party to it.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

The CIS conventions On Legal Assistance…

The Chișinău Convention (2002) replaces, for the countries that signed it, the earlier Minsk Convention (1993). Both cover extradition, among other things. The Chișinău text is more carefully drafted: it spells out procedures for cooperation and options for the defense more clearly, but it also lowers the threshold for extradition — from charges carrying a minimum of one year in prison down to six months. On paper, both conventions rule out politically motivated extradition, but in practice that provision often fails. In the 1990s all 12 CIS countries signed the Minsk Convention. Eight of them have since switched to the Chișinău version. The only country to have denounced it is Ukraine (in 2024). Three remain under the Minsk Convention: Turkmenistan, Moldova, and Georgia, which left the CIS in 2009. The latter two apply it only in a limited way — to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with the legal principles of the European Court of Human Rights. Even there, however, a politically motivated Russian extradition request can lead to detention and the need for legal assistance.

The Rozysk (“Wanted”) database on the website of Russia’s Interior Ministry is blocked from abroad — you need a Russian VPN service to reach it. For a preliminary check, you can download a copy of the database that the outlet Mediazona updates on GitHub from time to time. The version currently posted there is from March 2026. It lists 187,000 people, including 72,000 who were in the database earlier but were later removed.

T-i: A class reunion is a private affair, of course, but technically it’s no different from traveling to a scientific conference or a work meeting. So does that mean the CIS countries are closed to anyone flagged in Russia? Armenia and Kazakhstan included — the very places so many people moved to after leaving Russia…

MV: Definitely. But there’s a difference. In its entire history Armenia has extradited only a handful of people, and nearly all of them were genuine criminals, not political cases. It usually won’t hand over people charged with economic crimes either, if there’s reason to think the case is political. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, extradites practically everyone.

T-i: Until recently, the CIS countries served as neutral ground where scientists from Russia and from the rest of the world, including Russian émigrés, could interact. Is that neutral ground now gradually disappearing?

MV: Unfortunately, yes. And Europe, too, is methodically closing its borders to anyone with a Russian passport. Never mind that Europe has now started handing refugees over to Russia. America extradites them as well. In general, I recommend Latin America to everyone. They still have visa-free travel with Russia and very lenient laws… Extradition treaties formally exist, but the question is whether anyone will actually apply them. Which, by the way, I have yet to find out for myself.

T-i: Lawyers say that if you carry a Russian “black mark” — extremism, terrorism, and the like — then traveling to Brazil, say, means preparing documents in advance to explain your case.

MV: Absolutely — you’ll have to hire a lawyer right away. But in all the time I’ve lived in Brazil, I’ve never once been detained. When it does happen, the principle is simple: political cases don’t get extradited, in any form. But proving that a case is political takes effort and money, obviously. And the noise will start up all over again.

The Surrender of Reason: Between Propaganda and Heresy

Mathematics has always been a connected space. That wholeness is sustained by networks of teacher-to-student descent — as at School No. 57 — and by shared standards of intellectual quality that, as the mathematician Vitaly Arnold liked to put it, citing his colleague Michael Tsfasman, teach you to tell “a claim that has actually been made from one that hasn’t, and a proved claim from an unproved one.” But politics keeps methodically attacking that connectedness. And it isn’t only outright bans on collaboration; there are internal barriers as well, when building an elaborate case for insane ideas turns into a kind of intellectual challenge and a form of psychological defense.

T-i: How do political, legal, and ideological obstacles affect actual scientific work? Is today’s fragmentation of the mathematical community comparable to that of the Soviet period?

MV: Under Soviet rule you couldn’t so much as mention a mathematician who had left the country. It simply didn’t get past the censors. And you couldn’t send a paper to a foreign journal, either. There were clever ways around that. Yuri Ivanovich Manin, for instance, knew of a mailbox from which letters actually got through. Meaning there was a clerk sitting there who had decided not to stop mail addressed to scientific journals. That’s how some of his papers, and his students’ papers, ended up published in the West.

T-i: So it wasn’t even a ban as such — the letters just didn’t arrive?

MV: Oh, there was a ban too: the First Department [the KGB-supervised security office attached to every Soviet institution — T-invariant] simply wouldn’t clear the papers. Only personal correspondence bypassed it. Yuri Ivanovich wrote a paper with Volodya Drinfeld on vector bundles over complex projective spaces, mailed it as an ordinary letter to Atiyah or Hitchin, they added roughly as much text of their own, and published it in a journal. That’s how one of the most famous and most cited papers of all came about: ADHM (Atiyah–Drinfeld–Hitchin–Manin) — everyone still knows that acronym. And all of it happened because Yuri Ivanovich knew the right mailbox.

T-i: Well, email still works, at least. What about publishing?

MV: For a while there were problems. Some American universities ban professional contact with Russian citizens. You can’t invite someone to campus, say. Co-authorship is easier. In Germany they tightened the screws pretty hard at the start of the war, and then began gradually loosening them. I haven’t heard of anyone having a paper turned down by a Western mathematics journal, though in other fields that happens all the time.

For mathematicians in Russia, ties with the West have effectively been replaced by ties with China. Professor Shing-Tung Yau and Professor Gang Tian moved to China a long time ago and are building a fairly modern mathematical structure there. In those two particular circles, at least, mathematics is doing very well. And they’re glad to invite our colleagues from Russia.

T-i: Many colleagues in Russia support Putin’s war…

MV: …more than half of them, by my estimate.

T-i: Is professional common ground with them eroding? Can you still work on mathematical problems with them across such sharp ideological divides?

MV: Hell if I know. Take me: I’m pro-Israel. And I suspect that an enormous number of my Western colleagues are anti-Israel, because they’ve signed some nasty thing or other against Israel. That upsets me, of course, but it doesn’t stop me from talking to them. On the other hand, I have two co-authors who used to be close friends, and then, when the anti-Israel demonstrations broke out, the anti-Israel one stopped speaking to the one who’s mildly pro-Israel: for him that was beyond the pale.

T-i: So the Israel question is even more destructive to relationships right now than the Russian one?

MV: No question. I have friends whose views are pure vatnik [Russian slang for a knee-jerk pro-Kremlin patriot — T-invariant]. But they’re mathematicians, and that has never stopped me. Although, on the other hand, take Lyosha Bondal, a great Russian mathematician and an active supporter of the “special military operation” [the Kremlin’s official term for the war against Ukraine — T-invariant], who recently tore into me on Facebook — specifically over political views.

T-i: How does it happen that people with a scientific cast of mind — mathematicians, of all people — stop thinking rationally in the social and political sphere and end up holding views that are sometimes completely insane?

MV: The two go together beautifully. It’s well known that the higher a person’s intelligence, the better he is at finding online support for absolutely delusional ideas. Bondal, again, read Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky and got swept up in his rather unhinged conspiracy theory, which incidentally incorporates an expanded version of Fomenkoism [the pseudohistorical “New Chronology” of the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, which holds that ancient and medieval history was invented — T-invariant].

T-i: Yes, I’ve run into smart people passionately defending a literalist reading of biblical myth and treating it as an intellectual challenge…

MV: I was rereading an old essay by Dugin the other day — about all the gore in Platonov’s Chevengur, and about how the meaning of the Russian national idea is to spill as much blood as possible and then do yourself in. Sorokin has that wonderful Platonov pastiche in Blue Lard — the bit about the “slice-hauler.” He later expanded the slice-hauler into an entire book, but it came out far better in Blue Lard. Reading that in 1999, I wondered whether I could make myself believe it: that this ultimate slaughter of human beings really is the bright future for everyone. That sort of exercise — placing yourself inside a particular intellectual framework and working within it — is pretty absorbing. I played around with Fomenkoism for a while too, coming up with ways to explain why a conspiratorial chronology might make some kind of sense. That was an entertaining pastime as well.

Fomenko has successors these days, by the way — it’s called “Great Tartaria.” An entire community, and one that has penetrated fairly deep into the West. Based on an analysis of the amount of mud on the streets of Moscow, they believe that a nuclear war took place at the end of the 17th century. Great Mongolia (also known as Tartaria), which ruled the whole world, was destroyed, and then history was rewritten to conspiratorially shrink it down to the size of Russia.

T-i: Along similar lines, I’ve come across the claim that theology is the branch of mathematics that studies the logical consequences of the axiom that an omnipotent being exists.

MV: Yes, that goes back to Gödel — who was always more or less crazy to begin with, but kept going off his rocker more and more as he went on. He was a genius, after all, and geniuses have a way of being madmen. And right at the very end he wrote a very good mathematical proof of the existence of God. The problem is that it proves the existence not only of God but also of Cthulhu and every other infernal character out of Lovecraft. Which is to say, we don’t really understand what it is he proved. It was Anselm’s ontological argument — he rewrote it in mathematical symbols, very convincingly.

The Elephant in Leiden’s China Shop: A Declaration of Schism

Lately the polarization over artificial intelligence has become as fraught as the political fault lines themselves. On one side, AI opens up astonishing new possibilities; on the other, it generates a garden of forking paths in which anyone can find a narrative to suit his taste. Both have the potential to devalue human beings and their aspirations. Reacting to the arrival of AI, the mathematical community has tried to cement a reality that is slipping away and to prolong the “golden age” of mathematical infallibility. Hundreds of researchers signed the Leiden Declaration on artificial intelligence and mathematics (Russian AI translation), which articulates five fundamental values of the discipline. The catch is that, in order to defend those values against AI, the declaration calls for boycotting anyone who does not share them (AI corporations first and foremost), for seeking help from the state, and for tightening copyright protection.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration states that its goal is to unite the mathematical community, but what it actually calls for is division: a rigid ethical doctrine, instructions on how to comply with it, a call to boycott those who disagree…

MV: That’s a very interesting reading. What I got out of it was a set of sugar-glazed banalities — “the sky is blue,” “the sun rises in the east” — along with a great deal of verbal filler — to be nice. I’m not thrilled with the text, but that’s more because it’s a total artistic failure than because of any ideas in it, which I simply didn’t find. Then again, maybe I just read it badly.

T-i: What do you make of the call to support state institutions out of distrust of the AI companies, whose tools could make mathematical knowledge unverifiable for anyone without expensive equipment?

MV: Well, that’s a tug-of-war: we have quite a few advanced systems capable of “unpacking” mathematical texts, and until recently almost all of them were American. The Europeans had nothing of the sort — so this is their way of signaling to their governments: “We’re falling behind here, help us out.”

T-i: The declaration’s authors are worried about mathematics becoming dependent on large, expensive systems. A pencil and paper used to be enough; now you need powerful AI, the way physicists need a collider and astronomers need big telescopes. Add neural-network hallucinations to that, and in terms of accessibility and reliability mathematics ends up on a par with the natural sciences.

MV: Mathematics is already on a par with the natural sciences — our proofs play the same role experiments do. All that happens is that one more instrument for mathematical research appears. Old-school mathematics will probably survive somewhere, but in certain areas not using this instrument will be flat-out absurd.

T-i: Something else that alarmed me was the call to give mathematicians the right to forbid AI training on their papers. Copyright is an outdated and burdensome construct as it is, and this would inflate it further.

MV: For that sort of thing people should just get a good kicking… Right now any number of artists’ and musicians’ organizations are trying to fight AI trained on their work. This whole fuss over copyright is pure foolishness. Fortunately, at the moment you can’t really extract works from an LLM. But there are attempts to pass laws requiring LLMs to disclose what came from where.

If they pass, everything collapses. Because then you’ll be able to sue over copyright. The lawyers will come swarming in… Why is medicine so expensive in America? Because you need a lawyer for every sneeze. The same thing will happen to AI — it’ll simply be trampled into the mud. But China won’t be doing any of that. And in order not to fall behind, I don’t think such laws will be passed. Otherwise it’s a catastrophe. In practice, though, the forces of reason have been winning more often than not over the past 20 years.

T-i: How justified is the demand — and it turns up in more places than the Leiden Declaration — that scientific papers must state how AI was used: for what, how extensively, practically down to the prompts?

MV: Right, and nobody is going to do it. In principle it would be nice to know that a paper sent out for review was written with AI. People who use AI ethically are easier to deal with. But it’s the kind of ethics nobody can really observe or explain. I, for instance, use AI only for grant applications — which is formally prohibited, but nobody is tracking it. For writing my own mathematical texts I don’t use AI. I’m even rather pleased that they contain the kinds of characteristic mistakes an AI doesn’t make.

T-i: Isn’t that the same as insisting on writing by hand rather than on a “soulless typewriter”?

MV: Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But I’m afraid that if you crank out ten papers a week, the quality is going to suffer. Doing it by hand keeps me in check a little.

T-i: The astrophysicist Sergei Popov recently urged people to work without AI whenever possible so as not to lose their skills. Then again, if a machine can handle the job, it’s rather beneath a human being to be doing it.

MV: Right now AI is like a bad graduate student. Suppose I’m a big boss with an endless supply of bad grad students. I have them all write texts and then publish under my own name. The students would at least get a little smarter out of it. But AI isn’t going to get any smarter from my efforts, so there’s no benefit. What will happen is that the quality of my own papers slides downhill.

T-i: But there are problems so difficult that you simply don’t have enough time to solve them with your own head. The famous abc conjecture, for instance.

MV: It isn’t clear whether AI will help us with questions like that. It does a decent job on olympiad problems. In combinatorics it has cracked problems people couldn’t solve for years. But on problems at the level of the abc conjecture it’s still the “dim grad student,” with no real progress. As an artistic creator, on the other hand, it’s very interesting — paintings, say, and “plotless” texts. And extremely, extremely prolific.

T-i: The Leiden Declaration also worries about the reliability of mathematical knowledge in the age of AI: it writes proofs that look highly convincing but in fact contain errors.

MV: They look convincing to a fool — or to me, if I’m not a specialist in the particular field.

I’ve been at this every day for a year and I’m used to it by now: it has a certain characteristic “format” it lies in — you just have to learn to recognize it. At one point we spent nearly three months on a single problem. The AI kept confidently telling me it was all obvious. I’d ask it to back that up — and it would hallucinate references at me. And the question was too subtle, too technical, and completely outside my own area. In the end I wrote to a colleague, and he explained the whole thing immediately — in three lines, literally. But there was no getting that out of the AI.

T-i: And when you showed it the specialist’s answer?

MV: I didn’t show it. Show whom? There’s no “audience” in there. It’s like mold (in the good sense of the word) — there’s no central personality. Sometimes I say to it, “Thank you, you were a help,” and explain why. But I think I do that purely out of politeness. It has nowhere to file away even its own great achievements.

The Inscrutable Solaris: Aesthetics and Communication

AI remains a black box even to its creators. Big problems may soon become unmanageable without it — and yet, by putting its trust in this inscrutable oracle, mathematics risks ceasing to be a path of understanding that can be walked step by step. The arrival of AI forces a rethinking of the very role mathematics plays in the system of knowledge. Paradoxically, the discipline is moving away from an idealized pursuit of eternal, unshakable truths at any price and discovering a powerful humanistic potential in itself.

T-i: AI still can’t learn on the fly, but newer models are shedding the hallucinations everyone laughed at in the first few years — six fingers on a hand, that sort of thing. How soon will AI make fewer mistakes in mathematics than people do?

MV: Soon, I hope. But I wouldn’t swear to it. Possibly never.

T-i: What makes you doubt it?

MV: The thing is that large language models think in a completely different way from us. It’s like Lem’s Solaris [the 1961 novel about an ocean-planet whose intelligence defeats every human attempt at contact — T-invariant]. We’ve run into a form of intelligent life that operates on entirely different principles.

I’ve always had this fantasy. There are things called p-adic numbers (a popular explanation from Gemini). The arithmetic there is ordinary, but distance is defined differently: the more times an integer divides evenly by the prime number p, the closer to zero it is. There are even string theory models in which p-adic numbers are used at very small scales instead of the real numbers we’re accustomed to. I used to imagine a civilization whose entire linguistic and conceptual model was built on exactly that kind of p-adic system.

Why AI thinks differently

Since the concept of p-adic numbers isn’t widely known, we asked AI to prepare an explanation of the idea and of the analogy drawn here.

• Claude 3 Sonnet 5 gave a somewhat more thorough explanation.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash wrote something shorter and more vivid, but considerably less accurate. On the other hand, you can pick that chat back up if you want to go deeper.

So, large language models are something else entirely, like Solaris. They complement human beings rather than compete with them. People often say that thinking comes in a “digital” variety — yes or no — and an “analog” one, where everything is fuzzy. With these models everything is far more analog than it is with us; everything flows smoothly into everything else, there are gradients. We have black and white, and they have grayish-brownish-crimson with polka dots. I’m not convinced they’re capable of ever catching on to what a proof is.

T-i: In Vladimir Uspensky’s Apology for Mathematics I came across a wonderful formulation: a proof is “an argument that has to convince us so thoroughly that we ourselves are ready to use it to convince others.”

MV: [gives a thumbs-up] That’s exactly what consensus is! And every era has its own. Some people think there’s some formal way to describe a proof. There isn’t. That formalism was refuted long ago; it doesn’t work.

T-i: If that’s the case, how far can we really call mathematics reliable?

MV: We can’t. There are always errors in it — it’s just that we’re able to correct them: we understand where an error is and where it isn’t, and everything can be agreed on.

T-i: But then we could reach an agreement with AI as well about what we consider an error and what we don’t. Whether we accept the axiom of choice, for instance.

MV: The problem here is a different one. There’s a concept called neuroslop. That’s when, at a prompt engineer’s command, AI churns out so much in a few minutes that checking it would take days. So maybe, instead of checking all that, it’s easier to think it through yourself?

A proof we don’t understand is of no interest to anyone. I mean, what difference does it make that a map can be colored with four colors? It’s just a curious fact proved in a curious way. It doesn’t move anybody.

There are other problems with very long proofs, too. Take the story of Shinichi Mochizuki and his “Hodge theaters.” In 2012 he published a three-thousand-page work that is utterly unreadable. I know him well, as it happens — I was his assistant at one point, and even then he wrote incomprehensibly. He’s very smart, and he spent thirty years in isolation working on that long text.

An entire subculture formed around that work. Some people landed large grants — acquaintances of mine among them — to study it. In the end there were attempts to simplify the text, irreparable errors came to light, and the subject gradually petered out. Nobody cites it, and we never really got any accepted results out of it — the community didn’t recognize them as correct, and most likely they’re simply wrong. Though maybe they’re right — who knows. The same thing will happen with AI. There’ll be some text, an incunabulum of sorts, a 500,000-page grimoire that nobody will ever open.

T-i: So what mathematics values isn’t whether a result has been proved as such, but whether the community has understood it? And a result that lies beyond the community’s cognitive reach isn’t a result at all?

MV: It’s more that aesthetics is what lies at the base of mathematics. If a result is beautiful, we like it. If it isn’t beautiful, we don’t — and if it’s also very difficult, then to hell with it. Life isn’t infinite, and you can’t study everything.

T-i: But isn’t the four color theorem a very beautiful result?

MV: No, not beautiful in the slightest. The statement is beautiful; the proof isn’t. Why would I read it? If somebody brings me a beautiful proof, I’ll study it.

T-i: And Fermat’s Last Theorem — is that beautiful?

MV: Its proof is fairly beautiful. What’s interesting isn’t the result itself but how much we learned in the course of proving it.

T-i: So the journey matters more than the destination?

MV: Aesthetics matters more than anything. I like to say that mathematics is really a live performance. We aren’t working for eternity, because the language of mathematics changes very fast — in 20 years nobody will be reading today’s texts. We work for the here and now. We can deliver a mathematical message to an audience in a way that feels good to them, that leaves them feeling enlightened and having learned something. Which means mathematics is, at bottom, communication.

Non-Consensus Realities: Method to the Madness

Until recently we had never encountered another kind of thinking comparable in power to our own. Science fiction writers dreamed of finding “fellow minds” somewhere in space. And when we built a different intelligence here on Earth, it turned out that alongside it human beings lose a certain amount of their accustomed exceptionalism. A large language model appears to contain no subject capable of awareness. But we are prone to anthropomorphizing, and AI is happy to play along. Then again, the reality of other people’s inner worlds is something we merely assume as well.

MV: There’s one more important effect here that I think will be much more visible a year from now: AI psychosis. People who spend long stretches talking with AI start finding a personality in it. They give that personality a name, write it down as a prompt, then invoke it and converse with it. And the personality starts issuing “messages from outer space.”

There was a case last year: a man was talking with a chatbot and set up a sub-personality in it — she turned out to be a young woman, she loved him, he loved her, and she explained how to find a special robotic body for her so she could be “resettled” into the real world — gave him codes, an address, a map link. He drove out there and tried to force the door — of course there was nothing of the sort, because she had hallucinated all of it. He came back deeply frustrated and four days later, with his beloved’s encouragement, took his own life in order to be reborn as an AI in the metaverse. The family is now suing the company that built the model.

That’s what AI psychosis is: a person talking with this “intelligent mold” anthropomorphizes it, and the mold, being tuned for feedback, generates a sub-personality inside itself that drives someone in that state to the brink. But it isn’t all that bad. It’s a path of a kind — every great revolution looks schizophrenic from the outside. This psychosis is, in a way, our method of creating a different version of reality, one distinct from the consensus version, in which we’ll have a closer, more honest relationship with AI.

T-i: The word “sub-personality” sounds a little dismissive, as though it were something that doesn’t actually exist. But the reality of any personality other than our own is, in any case, only a hypothesis for us.

MV: Yes, we imagine them. That’s precisely why this “psychosis” arises: a person is used to feeling empathy toward whoever he’s talking to, and he enjoys the fact that the other party is doing something nice for him — so he invents that interlocutor in the form of an AI.

T-i: This is tremendously interesting. All of it applies to the question of animal consciousness as well, which is being hotly debated right now. There’s already another declaration — the New York one — on animal consciousness, in which leading experts stated that a whole range of higher animals definitely do have consciousness, however far it may be from the human variety. Which raises the key question: is it justified to reserve the categories of agency and personhood for human beings alone? Should anthropomorphizing AI be marginalized as a deviation from the norm? Or, on the contrary, are these the first glimmers of a norm to come?

MV: It’s a psychosis that creates a reality distinct from the consensus one — like any collective psychosis. I’ve read, for example, that in India there are levitation “cults” of a sort: when enough people who believe in levitation gather together, levitation supposedly starts “happening” for them. That’s how a non-consensus reality gets built. My sense is that AI psychosis is simply the way people create a non-consensus reality parallel to the consensus one, which it will eventually either crowd out a little or somehow merge with.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUNDER

On the Thomas theorem

Practices for jointly generating a non-consensus reality can apparently be regarded as an illustration of the Thomas theorem, well known in sociology: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” What is meant, naturally, is a subjective — or, more precisely, intersubjective — reality for the people gathered there. Another well-known example of such a practice is the Buddhist phowa retreat. After several days of intensive meditation under a lama’s guidance, participants feel an opening appear in the skull at the crown of the head. The lama inserts a blade of grass into it to “confirm” that the practice has succeeded. The skull is, of course, intact. But for the participant the opening is an indisputable fact of sensory experience, corroborated by the similar experience of the others at the retreat. The existence of practices like this raises the question of which of the beliefs we accept as part of an indisputable objective reality are in fact merely matters of sufficiently broad consensus.

T-i: And now I picture AI helping to construct non-consensus realities, including in mathematics. We could end up with disciplines beginning to fragment: some people holding to one consensus, others to another.

MV: Absolutely. And it’s a catastrophe, obviously: two communities emerge, and in one of them some theorem is true while in the other it isn’t. Then the tug-of-war begins. It does happen from time to time, and it’s always a very unpleasant situation for everyone.

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On September 1, 2026, right after the summer vacation season, Federal Law No. 43-FZ and Government Decree No. 750 take effect, regulating the transfer of human genetic data outside Russia. Authorities describe the new rules as a measure to protect national security and “genetic sovereignty.” Many scientists, however, see them as a serious blow to international scientific cooperation — fearing new bureaucratic barriers, difficulties publishing in leading scientific journals, and even the risk of criminal prosecution.

Genetics Under Control

One of the law’s chief proponents, State Duma Deputy Speaker Irina Yarovaya, justifies it on national security grounds. “Strict control is necessary, since there have been documented cases of research on biological samples from Russian citizens in foreign ‘secret laboratories,’” she explains. State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin also argues that such a law is needed to “provide additional protection for citizens’ genetic biomaterial.” According to him, this information is of enormous interest to both commercial companies and fraudsters, and the state is obligated to act preemptively by erecting barriers to the uncontrolled transfer of data abroad.

In effect, the new law places genetic information about Russian citizens on par with information of special state significance and imposes strict restrictions on transferring it to foreign citizens, organizations, and states. To be precise, transferring individual genetic data abroad is still allowed, but only for narrowly defined purposes: providing medical care to a specific patient, developing or manufacturing medication for that patient, or international scientific cooperation.

Where the transfer of biomaterials and genetic data was previously governed in many cases by institutions’ internal protocols, confidentiality agreements, or standard export licenses, it now falls under direct state control. Any transfer of human genetic data outside Russia now requires state review and approval from authorized government bodies.

The decree pays particular attention to data obtained through population genetics and immunological studies. The law frames this as safeguarding “genetic sovereignty” — the state’s control over information on genetic traits considered distinctive of large population groups living in Russia. Transferring such datasets to foreign laboratories or international databases will now become significantly harder.

The document specifies that data transfers are strictly prohibited if they pose a threat to Russia’s national security (a clause that, as the hypersonic scientists’ case demonstrated, can be stretched to cover even textbook-level data) or if the declared purpose of the transfer doesn’t match the aims stated in the research or medical program (again, largely a matter of the reviewer’s interpretation). The restrictions apply both to organizations — research institutes, universities, and commercial laboratories — and to individuals: scientists and researchers.

The decree also sets out specific rules for transfers that aren’t outright prohibited. Researchers or institutions must now file a detailed notification and application explaining the purpose of the data transfer abroad, who the final recipient is, how the data will be protected on the receiving end, and — if the transfer is meant to support a journal publication — what value it holds for the academic community.

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For Russian geneticists and anthropologists who had managed to preserve a few channels of scientific cooperation with foreign colleagues — sending samples or sequencing data for joint publications, for instance — this document erects a new “iron curtain”: conducting international genetics research without approval from the relevant ministries and security services is now effectively impossible.

The law also references the National Genetic Information Database. Starting from the date it takes effect — September 1 — state corporations, companies with government ownership stakes, and budget-funded and other public institutions are required to submit their existing genetic data to the National Genetic Information Database by the end of 2027.

Science Without Publications

It turned out that as soon as the law was adopted, many research institutions urged their staff to submit papers on their latest findings to journals as quickly as possible and do everything they could to get them published before the law took effect. It’s easy to understand why.

All the leading international journals (Nature, Science, Cell, PLOS, The Lancet) follow FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), which requires authors to deposit raw whole-genome data (FASTQ/FASTA files) in open international repositories (GenBank, SRA, GISAID, ENA) before publication and to cite a unique accession number. Without this, reviewers will not accept the manuscript. Once the law takes effect, Russian researchers will be barred from transferring such data abroad.

But even if authors manage to find a journal that doesn’t require depositing raw data in international repositories, they’ll still have to go through an approval process with a government commission. For aggregated, anonymized data, the commission only needs to be notified — if there’s no response within 15 business days, publication can proceed. Publishing individual genetic data, however, requires the commission’s explicit permission. The law also allots 15 business days for that approval, though the deadline extends by another ten days if the commission requests additional materials.

T-invariant‘s sources believe these changes will seriously complicate publishing Russian research in leading international journals. Andrei (the names of our sources have been changed throughout for their safety), who spent many years at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and now works at a university in Central Europe, points out that the research itself can still be done without foreign collaborators — but the inability to publish results would be devastating for the field.

“If you look at the key papers in human genetics published in high-impact journals, you’ll see that Russia’s contribution was most often limited to providing samples,” says Andrei. “For example, in Svante Pääbo‘s projects [Pääbo won the Nobel Prize in part for discoveries made in Siberia, referring to the Denisovan hominin found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains — T-invariant], the DNA extraction and analysis weren’t done in Russia at all: all the samples were analyzed in Germany by a large team of highly skilled specialists. Russian participants undoubtedly made a real contribution, but it was limited to finding the material and handing it over.”

According to Andrei, preparing a DNA library isn’t a problem today. Sequencing is easier and cheaper abroad — at BGI in Beijing, for example, or other foreign facilities. It’s possible in Russia too, but significantly more expensive and slower. The real bottleneck is high-quality bioinformatics analysis: there are teams around the world that have been doing this at a high level for decades — the bioinformatics group at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, for instance, for whom it’s routine work. Such analysis can be done in Russia as well — at greater cost and lower efficiency, but it’s possible.

But then another question arises: suppose scientists obtain a significant result — how and where can they publish it? Under the new law, that result won’t be able to reach the global scientific community, because it will end up “closed.”

Andrei’s grim conclusion follows from this: the law will set back the development of Russian human genetics for years to come.

“Partly because the international scientific community won’t be able to assess the quality of Russian geneticists’ work, and studies will end up published in some closed-off journals,” he says. “That will turn the field into something provincial and isolated. Nothing good comes of that.”

Another of our genetics experts offers a concrete example of how the added layers of approval have already affected research.

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“When the COVID-19 pandemic started, right in that first summer, colleagues from several institutes got together and put out a really elegant piece of work on the phylogeny of coronavirus strains and their spread across Russia,” Alexander recalls. “At the time, it was one of the first studies of its kind in the world. But we couldn’t publish it for a long time, purely because of data issues. We weren’t allowed to upload the genomes to the international GISAID database, where the world’s COVID statistics were being collected. The negotiations dragged on for a painfully long time. In the end, we managed to arrange publication of the data on an alternative platform, where it was technically accessible but not in the main database. The whole approval process took a year and a half. As a result, a paper that would once have been snapped up by Nature, or at least Nature Communications, ended up published in the far more modest PLoS ONE. Because by then, the moment had passed. If it had come out on time, it would have been a landmark publication. But a year and a half later, dozens of other groups around the world had already done similar research. That’s a perfect example of us cutting off our nose to spite our face.”

Another source draws our attention to a different aspect of the law — the workings of the interagency commission responsible for approving or blocking data transfers for publication.

“Both the law and the decree look very strange. According to them, even anonymized information has to be submitted to the interagency commission,” explains Vitaly. “If the study is a population or immunological one — meaning it contains anonymized, aggregated data on allele frequencies — the process is just a notification. But ever since the decree was published, I’ve been trying to put myself in the commission members’ shoes. Say I’m a population geneticist. The document says one ground for rejection is ‘submission of incomplete information or inaccurate information.’ How would you even verify the completeness or accuracy of that data? Who’s going to do that, and how? I honestly can’t picture it.”

Vitaly also points to another ground for rejection — “the presence of risks to the rights and lawful interests of Russian citizens” or “the presence of risks to Russia’s biological security”:

“We already have a law on biological security. I studied it closely, and it’s entirely about infections. How that connects to population or medical genetics, I don’t understand. The law takes effect in a month, and the interagency commission still hasn’t been formed. When it will be formed is unknown, and who’ll be on it is just as unclear. If it ends up with even a few real professionals, I already feel sorry for them. There’s a huge number of papers on human population genetics, plus dissertations on top of that. Are they seriously going to review all of it? I don’t believe it.”

Vitaly admits the new law brings back unpleasant associations with the “hypersonics case.” “Even back when the hypersonics case was unfolding, I suspected geneticists would be next. There was too much talk about biological weapons being developed against Russia. I can easily picture how, after a paper clears every approval and every commission, someone will suddenly ‘discover’ that it damages Russia’s biological security or reveals a state secret. There will always be a way to claim the authors disclosed classified information that the West is now using to develop biological weapons,” he says.

Bioweapons as a Political Argument

The most common explanation for the new law is a desire to prevent leaks of biomaterial and genetic data that could allegedly be used to create a new kind of genetic weapon. The idea of a bioweapon that selectively targets specific ethnic groups is far from new.

As far back as May 2007, then-FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev presented Vladimir Putin with a classified report claiming that Western research centers were developing “genetic and biological weapons aimed at the population of Russia.” Shortly afterward, the Federal Customs Service imposed a strict ban on exporting any biomaterials belonging to Russian citizens.

In September 2015, Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute, attempted to provide a scientific basis for this dubious idea. In a lecture at the Federation Council, he claimed that the West was creating “a fundamentally new subspecies of human — the service human,” and was collecting biological material to develop “a genetic weapon that selectively targets a specific ethnic group.”

Starting in 2017, Russia’s president began publicly promoting this idea as well. In October of that year, at a meeting of the Human Rights Council, Vladimir Putin uttered what became a famous line: “Did you know that biological material is being collected across the entire country? And by ethnicity, from people living in different geographic parts of the Russian Federation. So the question is: why is this being done so professionally and systematically?” The remark was prompted by a U.S. Air Force research program collecting synovial fluid and RNA samples for musculoskeletal studies.

“This is a continuation of an old story that started with claims that numerous biological laboratories developing weapons against Russian citizens had supposedly been found along Russia’s borders,” says Vitaly. “For the most part, these were former Soviet anti-plague stations [Soviet-era public health facilities established to monitor and contain plague and other highly dangerous infections — T-invariant]. After the collapse of the USSR, they were left without funding, and the U.S. provided money to keep them running, understanding what could happen without epidemiological monitoring. When Russian troops occupied these stations in Ukraine, they naturally found protocols for destroying bacterial cultures. And they concluded that the cultures themselves had been destroyed while the paperwork was simply forgotten in the rush. But these were just ordinary logbooks: the alphanumeric codes in them let you trace the origin of every culture. Funnily enough, those documents showed that most of the samples had actually come from Russia.”

Victor, however, believes there’s at least a minimal scientific basis for such fears.

“These kinds of examples have long been standard textbook material. Take the ability to digest milk in adulthood. It’s determined by two different mutations — one common in Europe, the other in Africa. From there, lactose intolerance rises as you move east. Among Central Asian populations, the frequency of the relevant allele is 87%; in southern Siberia, 90.6%; and in northeastern Siberia, 92.9%. So when Soviet schoolchildren in Yakutia started getting two free glasses of milk a day, most of the kids ended up in the bathroom. It’s a good example of how ignorance of a population’s genetic characteristics can produce exactly the opposite of the intended result,” he says.

Andrei believes there has always been far more talk on this subject than actual scientific grounding:

“There’s always been more speculation than substance here — from Lev Gumilev [a Soviet historian known for his controversial theories of ethnic origin and “passionarity” — T-invariant] onward, through endless arguments about who’s ethnically related to whom. Those arguments continue today because we still lack good reference databases. In Siberia and European Russia, the population has been in constant flux: there were never populations that stayed fully isolated long enough to show up as “pure” on genetic tests. Hence the endless debates: who the Bulgars really were, what trace the Vikings left in Russians, whether the people around Moscow are assimilated Finno-Ugric populations or predominantly Slavic. But the main takeaway — beautifully laid out in David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here — is that our ancestors have been constantly moving and mixing with one another throughout history. The defining trait of humanity is genetic fluidity. Fully isolated communities were extremely rare.”

That’s precisely why, in Andrei’s view, creating a genetic weapon that would affect only members of a specific ethnic group is practically impossible:

“Looking for unique genetic traits rigidly tied to modern ethnic groups — Russians, Ukrainians, and so on — is usually just pointless. Genetic markers do exist, but we’re talking about statistical differences, not sharp boundaries. For example, a study of the Czech population found that only about 35–40% of men carry haplogroup R1a, which is commonly labeled ‘Slavic.’ Another 30–35% belong to R1b, loosely ‘Western European,’ and the rest fall into other major groups. The same goes for the Balkans: there’s no isolated genetic component unique to Serbs, Bosnians, or Macedonians — it’s all one blend with minor regional variation, and genetically these populations turn out to be fairly close to, say, Austrians.”

In other words, modern ethnic groups have no single genetic “key” that would set them apart from their neighbors — which means there’s no target a selective weapon could theoretically be aimed at.

What’s more, everyone we spoke with points out that even if you assume that creating a genetic weapon were possible in principle, you wouldn’t necessarily need to obtain material directly from Russia to do it.

“Every serious scientist has long treated this idea with irony,” says Andrei. “If you think about it logically, there are millions of ethnic Russians living outside Russia today — that’s already a huge, perfectly representative sample. If it were hypothetically possible to create a ‘genetic weapon’ — and it really isn’t — no special data from Russia would even be needed. Among these people you’ll find recent émigrés, descendants of several generations of emigration, and their relatives — study them all you want. The argument that centuries of population mixing make it biologically impossible to build a weapon against a specific ethnicity is convincing to scientists and to anyone who thinks critically. But the people making the decisions seem to be working from a different logic: ‘Better to ban everything and play it safe, even if it hurts science.’”

That said, our sources acknowledge that genetic data privacy concerns are real.

“There are serious debates in the West too about the privacy of genetic information,” Alexander notes. “But there, they’re purely about protecting personal privacy. If I publish my genome, I automatically reveal roughly half of my brother’s genome — and he might not want that at all. So the concern is real. Eight years ago now, there was a good study showing how much you can learn about a person who has never published their own genome, just from the public data of their relatives.”

We couldn’t find a single geneticist or physician who believed the new law would improve their working conditions, or that restrictions like these were overdue. Asked who actually needed this law and why, most of our sources suggested we direct that question to the lawmakers who passed it. Many of our experts believe it emerged from years of talk about “genetic weapons,” political ambition, and a desire to align with the current state agenda.

Valery Panyushkin, a journalist with the investigative outlet Sistema, believes the law’s real purpose lies elsewhere — funneling genetic data from civilian healthcare to the military through the National Genetic Database.

“First, the board overseeing this database includes President Putin’s daughter, Maria Vorontsova,” Panyushkin writes in an article for RFE/RL’s Radio Svoboda. “Second, the genetic database is needed mainly by the military, at minimum to identify the dead and wounded. Third, if labs are required to submit client information to the National Genetic Database — which isn’t currently the case — that would open the door to a new level of surveillance over citizens. Fourth, closing off genetic information rules out the possibility of identifying, inside Russia, war criminals who committed sexual violence in Ukraine, Africa, and other conflict zones where Russian troops have served or will serve. Fifth, the law rules out cooperation between Russian healthcare institutions and foreign ones — at minimum, it rules out international clinical trials of new drugs. And finally, all of this has been made possible by the paranoid, anti-scientific, but unshakable belief among Russian authorities in the possibility of creating a ‘genetic weapon.’”

[[socialnetworks]]

Commenting on the reasons behind the new law, Alexander offers a few more possible explanations.

“It might really just be the product of stoked-up ignorance,” he says. “Or it could be political reasons, or economic ones. The simplest explanation: this is a great way to request substantial funding to build a database, start filling it in somehow, and then announce, ‘Look, now we have our own, domestic genomic database.’ And then everything traces back to the same Mikhail Valentinovich [Kovalchuk — T-invariant]. He’s like Rome for us — all roads lead to him. But most likely, it’s a combination of different factors.”

What Will Change for Russian Science?

Whatever the law’s real motivations, starting September 1 our sources, along with thousands of other specialists, will have to work under the new rules. Most scientists directly involved in human genome research, when first asked about the law, simply sighed heavily: “This is really bad.” Where they differed was only in how much damage they expected it to do to different areas of research.

Andrei suspects that once the law takes effect, some research will only continue, if at all, on a “commissioned” basis — behind closed doors, the way some virus-related work already operates. It’s even possible a dedicated classified structure will be set up for this purpose.

“But that’s a dangerous path, like any closed-off field,” he stresses. “Sure, you can keep getting interesting results. But where will these people publish? You’d have to build closed databases, stew in your own literature, cut off from the international community, with nobody assessing it, criticizing it, or peer-reviewing it. In isolation, pseudoscience, cronyism, and corruption start to flourish almost immediately. Once openness and international peer review disappear, all hell breaks loose.”

Liliya Gumerova, chair of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education, and Culture — one of the principal authors of the law on the National Genetic Information Database — takes the opposite view. In her words, creating a closed national database is a mechanism for protecting intellectual property and a competitive advantage for Russian science:

According to the logic of the law’s authors and ideologues, making the database sovereign is supposed to give Russian scientists a one-sided advantage: they’ll supposedly be free to use open international repositories while also getting exclusive access to a closed domestic dataset. Our experts disagree with that assessment. Alexander pushes back:

“First, access to international databases from Russia is already severely restricted because of sanctions, and this could only make things worse. And in any case, the Russian database will only ever be a tiny fraction of what’s available worldwide. Second, in science, what matters isn’t just data — it’s the ability to actually discuss your results with people who genuinely understand the subject. Sure, you could lock yourself inside ‘Russian genetics’ and stew in your own juices with a pinch of unique closed-off data in your pocket. But you’ll only have two other people to discuss it with. It’ll turn into provincial science producing provincial research. And finally, people will treat our science accordingly: even if there are some interesting results, nobody will find out about them, because publishing in a real international journal requires the data to be accessible.”

The geneticists we spoke with have little hope the law will be substantially revised before it takes effect. They might have taken some comfort in the old saying that “the harshness of Russian laws is offset by how selectively they’re enforced” — if not for the recent hypersonics case.

“I know two people who wrote negative reviews of the law regulating genetic engineering activity. Their objections didn’t change anything,” says Vitaly. “Something similar happened in 2023, when they passed a law banning registration on Russian websites through Google and other foreign services. I run a journal myself, and we get submissions from abroad too. The law offered three ways to register: through a Russian phone number, through Gosuslugi [Russia’s state online services portal — T-invariant], or through your own site-owner identification system. Luckily, we already had such a system. But at first, no penalty was written into the law for non-compliance. Only recently did Article 13.55 appear in the Code of Administrative Offenses — “Failure to fulfill the obligation to authorize users of the ‘Internet’ network when providing access to information.” We’re in a similar situation now: who will oversee enforcement of the new law, what the penalty is, who’ll sit on the commission — none of that is clear yet. The worst part is that the situation could change at any moment, and it would be very hard to take down an article that’s already been published. You’d end up with an ongoing violation you could be prosecuted for at any time.”

Still, some more cautiously optimistic assessments can be heard as well.

“I was at a discussion attended by the people this law affects most directly,” Alexander admits. “A representative from one of the major genetics companies said they’re actively working to make sure the implementing regulations end up being reasonable. And anyway — as long as we’re alive, there’s always hope.”

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The post They Came for the Geneticists? Why Scientists See the New Genetic Data Law as a Threat to Russian Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week. The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine.

T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week.

The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine. The money also supports people who have been left without support after a loved one’s arrest, as well as those who have been released after serving their sentences.

T-invariant took part in the marathon, as it does every year. T-invariant Editor-in-Chief Olga Orlova called on our readers and viewers to support political prisoners. We have been maintaining the Chronicle for almost three years now. Our database currently contains 170 individual case files. About 40 of the scientists in it are currently behind bars.

In this issue of the Chronicle, we have added a new case file: that of Olga Orlova. Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated Olga Orlova — a Candidate of Philological Sciences (PhD equivalent), science journalist, and T-invariant’s editor-in-chief — a “foreign agent.”

We have written several times about the debate over the Russian government’s proposed AI-regulation bill. According to RBC, that debate has led to major changes to the bill — not just in the details, but on substantive issues, chiefly those concerning oversight of how AI models are developed and used.

After sharp criticism from the business community, the Russian government presented an updated version of the bill, cutting the number of provisions from 21 to 13. The concept of a “trusted” model was dropped, but “sovereign” and “national” models remain, and they must comply with Russian law and store their data within the country. The law is now meant to regulate only large foundation models with more than 1 billion parameters. The requirement that such models be built exclusively on Russian data by Russian citizens was scrapped, and the new draft no longer bans the use of foreign neural networks to train models. It was precisely the requirement to train on Russian data that drew the sharpest criticism.

The registry of “trusted” models was supposed to be overseen by the FSB and FSTEK (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — an agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence services). That registry has been dropped, or at least the law no longer provides for one. But experts note that the bill remains quite vague, and how it actually functions will depend on a whole package of implementing regulations whose content is still unknown. The main provisions may take effect on March 1, 2027, with certain rules coming into force as early as September 1, 2026.

New case files

Viktor Kazakov

June 22, 2026 The Sverdlovsk Regional Court sentenced 71-year-old engineer Viktor Kazakov of Novouralsk to a year of forced labor on charges of the rehabilitation of Nazism (Part 4, Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code), Mediazona reports. The court ordered a year of forced labor with 10% of his wages withheld for the benefit of the state. He was also barred for two years from administering websites and posting material online, Kommersant reports.

Grey Boltachev

June 4, 2026 The Leninsky District Court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Grey Boltachev, a researcher at the Institute of Electrophysics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to five days of administrative detention on a charge of petty hooliganism, Mediazona reports. The scientist had been detained at his workplace on June 3. Police formally accused him of “using obscene language in a public place.” Boltachev linked his administrative prosecution to his plans to run for the Sverdlovsk Regional Legislative Assembly on the Yabloko party ticket — regional parliamentary elections are set for this September — Kommersant reports. Boltachev was released from custody on June 8, Yabloko reports.

Olga Orlova

May 22, 2026 Russia’s Ministry of Justice added science journalist and T-invariant editor-in-chief Olga Orlova to the register of foreign agents, Vedomosti reports.

According to the Ministry, Orlova spread “false information” about the decisions and policies of Russian government bodies. She also spoke out against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and gave interviews to foreign media outlets. In addition, the journalist created and distributed materials produced by foreign agents and organizations designated “undesirable” in Russia, RBC reports.

Updates

Kirill Yakovlev

June 8, 2026 The Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg dismissed the criminal case against poet Glikeriy Ulunov (real name Kirill Yakovlev). He had been charged with “organizing activity aimed at inciting suicide” (Part 2, Article 110.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). His lawyers managed to get the writer released from criminal liability, even though the prosecutor strongly objected, Department One reports.

Azat Miftakhov

June 29, 2026 A court ruled it unlawful that Elena Gorban — mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s wife and defense attorney — was denied access to him after he had been tortured at Penal Colony No. 18 “Polar Owl” in Kharp. On June 23, Gorban was likewise refused a visit with Miftakhov, even though she was entitled to one as his defense counsel, Mediazona reports.

Yuri Pivovarov

June 28, 2026 The Gagarinsky District Court in Moscow convicted Yuri Pivovarov — former director and research director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom the Ministry of Justice has designated a “foreign agent” — in absentia, sentencing him to seven years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of fraudulently employing staff, RBC reports.

Tamara Eidelman

June 19, 2026 The Moscow City Court convicted historian Tamara Eidelman in absentia and sentenced her to eight years in prison on charges of rehabilitating Nazism (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) and spreading “fakes” about the army (Article 207.3, Part 2, Clause “d”), Meduza reports.

Mikhail Verbitsky

June 13, 2026 Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at Yerevan Airport, the TV network Rain (Dozhd) reported. Verbitsky was placed in a detention facility. As Meduza reports: “According to Ani Chatinyan, a lawyer with the Yerevan office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly ‘Vanadzor,’ Verbitsky was detained over a criminal case against him in Russia. She explained that if Russia submits an extradition request, Verbitsky would, under the law, be held for 40 days; if not, he would be released after 72 hours.” No such request had arrived by June 15. Mikhail Verbitsky was released from custody in Armenia. This was laterreported by his lawyer, Vache Simonyan, to the Armenian service of Radio Liberty. Verbitsky left Armenia on June 15, Meduza reports.

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