CGO asks Montenegro’s Academy to distance itself from Putin ally rector Sadovnichiy

The Center for Civic Education (CGO) has asked the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts (CANU) to distance itself publicly and unequivocally from the positions and activity of its foreign member Viktor Sadovnichiy, and to consider changes to the Statute that would enable the termination of membership in cases of public support for aggression, war crimes or other grave violations of international law, as Vijesti reports. The coordinator of the “Active Citizenship” program at CGO, Sara Çabarkapa, stresses in the statement that Sadovnichiy, rector of the “Lomonosov” Moscow State University, is a longtime collaborator of Russian president Vladimir Putin and the initiator of the letter of Russian university rectors with which the invasion of Ukraine was supported.

At the same time, as Vijesti reports, CGO has repeated its call to academician Dragan Vukçeviq to renounce his membership in the International Association of Academies of Sciences (MAAN), which, according to them, is closely linked with the regimes in Moscow and Minsk. They also asked CANU to clearly distance itself from that “compromised association” and to interrupt institutional cooperation with it. CGO recalls that Sadovnichiy has been a foreign member of CANU since December 6, 1996 and still figures on the list of members of the Department of Natural Sciences on CANU’s official website. CGO had stressed earlier that Vukçeviq, head of the CANU Lexicographic Center, took part in September 2024 in Moscow in the session of the MAAN Council. “Among the speakers at that gathering, besides sanctioned officials such as Dmitrij Mezencev and Mihail Kovalçuk, was also Viktor Sadovnichiy. In other words, the CANU academician shared the podium in Moscow with the foreign member of his own Academy, one of the most prominent supporters of the Putin regime in the Russian academic community,” Çabarkapa said.

Sadovnichiy, a mathematician born in Ukraine, has been at the head of Moscow State University since 1992. Since 2002 he has been a member of Putin’s governing party “United Russia” and a member of its Supreme Council, while in 2003 he was elected to the State Duma as the head of that party’s Moscow list, but he renounced the MP mandate. During the presidential elections in Russia in 2012, 2018 and 2024 he was officially registered as the trusted person of presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, while in 2018 he was a member of the initiative group that nominated Putin’s candidacy for president. “After the start of the Russian aggression in 2022, Sadovnichiy was the initiator of the letter of the rectors of Russian universities with which the invasion of Ukraine was supported. He has been under Ukrainian sanctions since June 2022, while because of his support for the aggression, the universities in Kharkiv, Kyiv and Dnipro revoked his honorary doctorates. According to the available information, Sadovnichiy does not figure on the list of persons against whom Montenegro applies restrictive measures, which further emphasizes CANU’s responsibility to itself clearly determine itself toward the activity of its foreign member,” Çabarkapa stresses, as Vijesti reports.

Sadovnichiy, she adds, was elected to CANU long before he became Putin’s electoral confidant and “public supporter of the war,” while according to the CANU Statute membership in the Academy is for life. However, she stresses, lifetime membership does not also imply an “obligation of silence of the Academy” regarding the activity of its members. “Ukrainian universities undertook concrete consequences because of his support for the aggression, while the pan-European academy Academia Europaea suspended his membership in March 2022 by a unanimous decision, condemning in the harshest words the statement with which, as president of the Russian Union of Rectors, he supported ‘Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine.’ Yet CANU, even after more than four years of war, has not publicly determined itself on the fact that among its members is the initiator of that letter. Such a stance is difficult to reconcile with the declarative support that CANU has expressed for Ukraine, as well as with the foreign policy orientation of Montenegro, which is harmonized with the foreign and security policy of the European Union. Moreover, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), of which CANU is a member, in 2022 suspended the membership of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus,” Çabarkapa recalls.

According to her, keeping in membership a person who has publicly supported aggression against a sovereign European state, without any public distancing from his positions and activity, opens a serious issue of CANU’s credibility and sends the message that support for war produces no consequences for status in the Montenegrin academic community, and this “consequently also harms the international reputation” of the state of Montenegro, the Vijesti reporting concludes.