As European Union foreign ministers gathered in Athens at the weekend to discuss a way out of the Ukrainian crisis, violent pro-Russian activists were occupying local administration buildings and hoisting Russian flags in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. Analysts fear that the riots might have been deliberately launched to provoke Russian troops to move farther into eastern Ukraine, where a large proportion of the population is ethnic Russian.

Western governments have warned the Kremlin and its increasingly unruly leader, Vladimir Putin, off further military adventures. As we report on page 162, sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to last month’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula are threatening to affect scientific collaborations. Should the crisis continue to escalate, scientific relations between Russia and the West might suffer in earnest — at least for a while.

This would be unfortunate and almost certainly counter-productive. Moscow’s violation of international law cannot be tolerated and Putin must know that there will be serious consequences for his attempt to grasp territory that belongs to another country, no matter what historic and cultural ties exist between the two nations. But science and education — spheres with a unique potential to build trust between nations — should not be used as pawns in the current conflict.

A move by NASA to suspend official contacts with Russian space entities (with the exception of activities involving the International Space Station), for instance, was premature and should be revised. The United States and Russia have collaborated in space for 40 years. Their cooperation survived the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when almost all other official ties between the cold war superpowers had been cut.

When the Soviet Union began to fall apart ten years later, Western support of science in the region effectively kept many Soviet nuclear experts from selling their skills to the highest bidder. And US space activities continue to depend to no small extent on Russian launch vehicles and know-how.

The Crimea crisis, for all the concerns it is raising, is no excuse for ending a successful partnership.

This long and fruitful history of scientific cooperation has proved a solid base for Western relations with Russia, and there can be no doubt that international science has benefited from research carried out in labs from Vladivostok to St Petersburg and Kiev. The political success of scientific and academic exchange programmes launched during and after the cold war — including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s small but perfectly formed Science for Peace and Security Programme, which shut down its Russian operations last week — goes to show that civilian science is a veritable peacekeeping activity. Given that, it seems absurd to halt collaborations when the political weather turns bad.

Output of Russian science declined substantially after 1990 — Ukrainian science even more so — but expatriate mathematicians, chemists and physicists have brought many skills and fresh ideas to Western labs. The Crimea crisis, for all the concerns it is raising, is no excuse for ending this successful partnership.

In fact, it could become a reason for Western universities, scholars and think tanks to refocus on a part of the world whose social and political dynamics they have neglected as their interest has shifted to regions such as China and the Arab world. People in the West have been surprised by what is happening in Crimea in part because they know so little about the region and its history. And many Western observers are stunned by Putin’s resolute pursuit of power, and the level of support that it receives at home, because even in the scholarly world interest in Russian affairs has been low for years.

Individual scientists may have strong feelings about the independence of Ukraine and Crimea, and many will be disturbed by the nationalist chauvinism that is palpable in some Russian and Ukrainian circles. Some may therefore choose not to attend conferences and meetings in Russia as long as the crisis is raging. But funders and science policy-makers should take a calmer and more strategic view. It would not help the West, Crimea or Ukraine if Russia’s current efforts to strengthen and reorganize its struggling science and higher-education systems were to fail. On the contrary: a society that cannot afford to give its best minds the opportunity to pursue science in a free intellectual environment will be more prone to resort to the nationalistic rhetoric and resentment that will fuel conflict — and not only in Ukraine. As in any crisis, the worst thing one can do is to stop talking.