Regions, one after another, have started restricting abortions. Following Crimea, private clinics in the Kursk region stopped providing abortion services, and in the Tver region, a law was enacted prohibiting the 'temptation' of women towards abortions. The bans are based on an unscientific theory that they will supposedly stop the decline in birth rates, even though it has long been debunked by scientific research and international practices.
"We Can Explain" collected other vivid examples of pseudoscientific initiatives:
Director of the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Kudryavtsev, claimed that people lived for 900 years 'before the flood,' and the cause of genetic diseases is numerous sins, both original and 'personal.'
Shamans in the Southern Federal District began conducting magical rituals for the 'support of fighters on the front' and 'closing cities from the war.' Earlier, shamans from Buryatia sent yurts of Huns to assist Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
Margarita Simonyan stated that Russia can disable global electricity with the explosion of a nuclear bomb over Siberia, which turned out to be a fabrication — physicist Mikhail Mogilevsky refuted Simonyan's statements.
The chief ideologist of the "Russian peace," Alexander Dugin, stated that "Russia refuses to recognize gravity because it is an Anglo-Saxon invention."
By Putin's order, a commission of the Security Council of the Russian Federation was created "to counter modern threats to biological security." Putin claimed that Ukraine is trying to "cover up the traces of secret programmes" for the development of biological weapons.
In Khakassia, scientists from the Institute of Language, Literature, and History appealed to the head of the republic to stop the "genocide of science." Earlier, a scientist critical of the unscientific encyclopedia about the republic, written by his superiors, was fired from the institute.
Against this background, there is a mass exodus of scientists from Russia. In the last 20 years, their number has decreased by 25%, according to Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev.