MIT has come under fire recently for taking donations from Jeffrey Epstein and for working with the Saudi Arabian government. Now it's extended a partnership with a Kremlin-connected tech research institute, despite FBI concerns. wgbhnews
Late last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology signed a five-year extension of a multimillion-dollar partnership with a Russian technology research institute that has long raised espionage fears among foreign policy experts and the FBI. The contract renewal was a dramatic reversal in an MIT-Russia partnership that appeared to be dormant.
Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia’s richest men and a member of Putin’s inner circle, heads up the Skolkovo Foundation and was the linchpin for the deal with MIT. Phillip Frost, an American billionaire based in Florida, served as an advisor to Skolkovo and to Vekselberg. Frost, who made a fortune from generic pharmaceuticals, said in an interview that MIT’s connection to the project was a win-win situation. “MIT is a great institution and has a long history of being very successful with its tech transfer efforts and has benefited greatly from the royalties that they enjoy from that effort.
“Everything that we do is open, publishable, unclassified, freely available research,” Tidor said. “You can go to our website and read about the projects that we support, the research that's being covered. It's all published. It's all open. If we didn’t do it with Russia, we would do it with someone else.”
The Skoltech curriculum includes a series of disciplines with potential military or espionage value, including data science, high-performance computing, materials science and advanced manufacturing technologies. Shortly after MIT and Skolkovo inked the initial agreement in 2011, Russian defense contractor KAMAZ announced that it would build a research and development center on the Skolkovo campus.
After the sanctions were announced, MIT removed Vekselberg from the Board and erased any online reference to his tenure there. An MIT spokeswoman told NECIR that Vekselberg was taken off the Board after he was placed on the Treasury Department’s designated Russian nationals list. But Professor Tidor of MIT downplayed concerns about Vekselberg. “The project that we’re involved with is bigger than any one individual,” said Tidor.
“I'm actually on the ad hoc faculty committee looking at creating guidelines for how MIT chooses its outside engagements,” Tidor said. “And I can say that people are being very thoughtful in examining what principles we should apply, how they reflect our values and how they affect our ability to have impact in the world.”
“With so many [sic] negative buzz and this whole environment between the U.S. and Russia and the security concerns, it's hard to believe,” Ponomarev said. “Of course, for MIT it was beneficial financially. [The] Russian government was paying quite a lot, there was hundreds of millions” of dollars.
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