Boycott ICM 2022 in Russia

This page was created for mathematicians to protest against hosting the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2022 by Russia. Saint Petersburg was chosen as the next ICM venue at the 2018 General Assembly in São Paulo.

Statement of Purpose
History of this initiative
To spread the word: door sticker [orange] [white]

Here are some of the reasons to boycott:

Political prisoners [wiki]
In recent years the number of human rights defenders, journalists and scientists in Russian prisons and penal colonies has risen sharply. As for September 2018, the Russian human rights centre Memorial reports there are at least 188 political prisoners or prisoners of conscience. In the Russian Federation political prisoners are often subjected to abuse or torture.
Currently imprisoned include the filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who is on hunger strike since May 2018.
Repression of opponents [wiki]
The most widely known critics of Putin's regime who have been assassinated include the journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, liberal politician Sergei Yushenkov, human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, journalist and anti-fascist Anastasia Baburova, human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, American journalist and chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Paul Klebnikov, physicist and liberal politician Boris Nemtsov. To touch the topic of mathematical sciences, the famous inventor of knot invariants Victor Vassiliev was arrested in 2014 during a peaceful protest in support of the defendants in the Bolotnaya Square Case. At the time of writing this page police crushed a peaceful protest and over 400 people were detained in Saint Petersburg.
Discrimination of LGBT people [wiki]
In 2013 Russia adopted a federal law which de facto criminalizes LGBT culture. The respective law was adopted in March of 2012 by the governor of St. Petersburg Georgy Poltavchenko, who is a co-chair of the Executive Organizing Committee for the ICM 2022. This resulted in numerous arrests of Russian LGBT citizens publicly opposing the law and there has reportedly been a surge of homophobic propaganda, violence and hate crimes using the law as justification. In 2017 United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the wave of torture and killings of gay men in Chechnya.
Annexation of Crimea [wiki] and ongoing war in Ukraine [wiki]
In February-March 2014 Russian military troops invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. The United Nations General Assembly condemns the annexation and calls upon all states and international organizations not to recognize or to imply the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory. Another resolution of UN documents that Russia systematically curtails civil, political and cultural rights of Crimean Tatars.
International organizations recognize Russian presence in the military conflict in the East of Ukraine. The war started in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea. It has already taken more than 10,000 lives, wounded over 25,000 and made more than 2,000,000 people to flee their homes. Russian military supplied and subsequently recovered the missile launcher that shot down a scheduled passenger flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July 2014, killing 298 people.
Air strikes in Syria [wiki]
In 2015 Russia joined the Syrian civil war in support of the president Bashar al-Assad, whose army uses against its population such internationally condemned methods as barrel bombs and chemical strikes. Between April and August 2018, Russia conducted at least 13,000 air strikes. As for September 2018, the UK-based Syrian Network for Human Rights reports over 6,000 civilians killed by the Russian Forces, while the total death toll reaches over 200,000.

The aim of the boycott is not to penalize Russian mathematicians for the actions of Russian government or prevent their collaboration with the colleagues abroad. The Congress is co-organized and financed by the Russian government. We believe that by recognizing the Congress in Russia, the mathematical community implicitly lends credibility to Putin's regime.

Signed by:

Masha Vlasenko	Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Oleksii Tovpyha	Institute of Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine
Marcin Kotowski	University of Warsaw
Piotr Achinger	Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Adriana Salerno	Bates College (USA)
Tyler Kelly	University of Birmingham, UK
Alexander Hoover	University of Akron, USA
Marco Carfagnini	United States
Ioannis Markakis	USA
Michał Kotowski	University of Warsaw, Poland
Kimberly Ayers	USA
Alex Fink	Queen Mary University of London, Great Britain
Sarah Carr	LMU Germany
John Voight	Dartmouth College
Diana Davis	United States of America
Carlos Castano-Bernard	Mexico
Andrey Gogolev	Ohio State University, USA	One can effectively argue that math should be above politics. There is a lot of truth to it as nowadays math goes across the borders, cultures and politics. Still there is threshold of what is acceptable. For me personally, after the war of 2014, setting a foot on russian soil, not to mention participating in government backed and supported event, is simply unimaginable. Understandably, the outlook of Russia-based mathematicians, even those who vocally oppose the regime (see Vassiliev, Vershik etc.) could be different.
Max Lahn	Brown University (US)
Joshua Lebo	Brown University, United States
Signe Golash	Brown University, United States
Zsofia Biegl	United States
Michael NIsenzon	Brown University
Emma-Dennis-Knieriem	Brown University
Joseph Hlavinka	United States
Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson	CUNY College of Staten Island, USA
Bryan Xian	Brown University, USA
Madelyn Adams	Brown University, USA
Batia Friedman-Shaw	United States	Fight for our rights with the mathematical community
Henry Talbott	Undergraduate mathematics major at Brown University, USA
Noah Picard	Brown University, USA
Jeanne Allen	United States
Frank Farris	Santa Clara University, USA
Suzanna O’Neill	USA
Rhea Mathews	United States
Emily Tunkel	US
Oleksandra Beznosova	USA
Zoltan Kocsis	University of Manchester
Joshua Zelinsky	Iowa State University, USA
Alyson Singleton	Brown University, United States of America
Katrina Honigs	University of Utah	Russia is not a safe place for all of my colleagues to visit.
Valokdemar Skou	University of Copenhagen, Denmark
George Schaeffer	Stanford University
Maciej Zdanowicz	EPF Lausanne, Switzerland
Darij Grinberg	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Mauricio Genta Enriquez-Sarano	Undergraduate math student, Faculty of sciences, Udelar, Uruguay
Lawrence Jack Barrott	NCTS (Taiwan)
Spencer Bagley	Westminster College, UT, USA
Taras Lehinevych	National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Asvin Gothandaraman	USA Wisconsin Madison
Daira Hopwood	UK	I fully support Russian mathematicians and the immense contribution they have made to mathematics in general, but holding a conference there given the politics of the current regime is the wrong decision. In particular, LGBT mathematicians would be unsafe at such a conference.
Ian Hill	Undergraduate Mathematics Student, United States of America
Ajeet Gary	United States of America
Yassin Chandran	University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
emily rexer	Emory University USA
Brandis Whitfield	Undergraduate Mathematics Student, United States
Bogdan Petrenko	Eastern Illinois University
Olexander Strilets	Ukraine
Andriy Prymak	University of Manitoba, Canada
Bogdan Savchynskyy	Heidelberg University
Alexandre Kosyak	Institute of Mathematics, Kiev, Ukraine
Irina Yehorchenko	Institute of Mathematics, NAS of Ukraine	Holding major international events means direct and open support for Russian aggression in Ukraine, support for killing Ukrainians and Syrians. Organisers and participanrts of such events actually declare that they support annexation of Crimea, political repressions and killings in Russia and Russia-organised killings in other countries. Its a hypocrisy if people say that math is beyond politics - nothing is beyond politics. International organisers and visitors of such event help aggression, totalitarism and killings
Dmitri Finkelshtein	Swansea University, UK
Yuriy Drozd	Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Volodymyr Lyubashenko	Institute of Mathematics, Kyiv, Ukraine
Dhruv Ranganathan	University of Cambridge, UK	My colleagues deserve to be safe at the ICM.
Ana Rita Pires	University of Edinburgh, UK
Lyudmila Turowska	Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Roman Popovych	University of Vienna, Austria
Anatoly Holub	Institute of Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine
Yuliia Mishura	Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Danyl Proskurin	Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, associate professor of Faculty of Computer Sciences and Cybernetycs
Volodymyr Makarov	Institute of Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine
Vitalii Vasylyk	Institute of Mathematics, NAS of Ukraine
Vasyl Ostrovskyi	Institute of Mathematics, NAS of Ukraine
Dmytro Savchuk	University of South Florida
Viacheslav Rabanovich	Institute of mathematics, NAS of Ukraine	There are a lot of mathematicians who expressed some points of view that are different from Russian Government's one. They will be in danger being in Russia with such a record. And even this comment can be the record.
Igor Burban	University of Paderborn, Germany
Alexander Soifer	University of Colorado, USA	I am grateful to the July 29-30, 2018, General Assembly (GA) of the International Mathematics Union (IMU) for following my urging and deciding to replace the name of Rolf Nevanlinna, a Hitler supporter, on its prize and medal. However, GA erred in granting criminal tyrant Putin a propaganda tool by selecting Russia for hosting ICM-2022. War on Georgia, Annexation of Crimea, War on Ukraine, etc., etc., etc. are the gravest violations of the international law, and must not be rewarded. I do not think that for countries to order their mathematicians not to attend is right. I support the boycott on the individual level, by those who are not only mathematicians, but also human beings of high moral standards.