In the heart of Kyiv stands a building that has been associated with Ukrainian science for more than a century.
The Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was struck by a Russian jet-powered drone on September 28, setting parts of the historic building on fire and forcing staff to escape through windows. The attack killed at least two people and injured several others, according to Ukrainian officials.
The building at 54 Volodymyrska Street is itself older than the academy. Constructed in the 1850s, it was originally built for the Institute for Noble Maidens founded by Countess Yelyzaveta Levashova. A third floor was added in the late 19th century, and the building eventually became the home of the academy’s leadership.
But the significance of the site goes far beyond its architecture.
An academy born in 1918
The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was founded in Kyiv in November 1918, during the short-lived Ukrainian State under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi. The founding meeting elected Volodymyr Vernadsky, a geologist and geochemist who had already earned international recognition, as its first president.
Vernadsky became particularly influential for his work on the biosphere and the role of living organisms in shaping the Earth’s geological processes. He also established the academy’s first chemical laboratory, helping lay the institutional foundation for several research institutes that followed.
The institution was created with an unusually broad ambition: to build a national centre for both fundamental and applied research. Over the decades, its name and institutional structure changed as Ukraine passed through the Soviet period and then became independent. Since 1994, it has been known as the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Today, NAS Ukraine describes itself as the country’s highest scientific self-governing organisation, covering research ranging from mathematics and physics to engineering, biology, medicine, social sciences and the humanities.
From welding and computers to medicine
Much of the academy’s importance lies in the scientific schools and research institutes it built rather than in a single discovery.
One of its best-known legacies is the Paton school of electric welding. Scientists at the E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute developed technologies for welding and joining metals under difficult conditions, including underwater and in space. Boris Paton, who led the institute for decades and served as academy president for many years, also helped develop technologies for welding living biological tissue. The technique was subsequently used in hundreds of thousands of surgical procedures, according to the academy.
His honours reflected the scale of his work. Paton received the 2010 Global Energy International Prize, the UNESCO Einstein Silver Medal and UNESCO Aristotle Gold Medal, as well as the Lenin and State Prizes of the USSR and Ukraine. He was also twice named a Hero of Socialist Labour and became the first person to receive the title Hero of Ukraine.
From early computing to graphene
Another major name associated with the academy is Viktor Glushkov, who established a Ukrainian school of cybernetics that gained international recognition. The academy’s Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics continues that tradition, with current work including robotics, cybersecurity, and digital medicine.
There are also more recent examples of academy scientists working at the edge of international research.
Serhiy Sharapov, a physicist at the Bogolyubov Institute of Theoretical Physics-one of the premier research institutions governed directly by NAS Ukraine-worked with Valery Gusynin on the theoretical prediction of the quantum Hall effect in graphene.
Sharapov’s work was later cited by Andre Geim, who went on to share the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for research on graphene. The Ukrainian National Research Foundation says Sharapov’s work has received thousands of citations in scientific literature.
The academy itself has not produced a Nobel Prize winner as an institution, but Nobel laureates have been connected with it. Among them is Aaron Ciechanover, the Israeli biochemist and 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, who was awarded the academy’s Vernadsky Gold Medal in 2023. Aaron holds an official connection to NAS as an elected Foreign Member.
The academy also awards its own Vernadsky and Borys Paton gold medals for major scientific contributions.
A scientific institution still working during the war
The academy’s work is not confined to its history.
In 2025, its scientists received academy prizes for research ranging from satellite monitoring of fires and air pollution to new titanium alloys and alternative-energy fuels. Researchers at the Glushkov Institute are also working on mobile robotic systems, cybersecurity and digital medicine.
The academy’s scientific publishing network remains substantial. Its institutions are founders of 279 scientific periodicals, with 64 indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection databases. Sixty-two of its journals are also classified in Ukraine’s top Category A tier of scientific professional publications, while 14 are republished by foreign publishers.
The war has also directly affected the academy’s wider network. NAS Ukraine says more than 300 buildings and other objects belonging to its property complex have been destroyed or damaged since Russia’s full-scale invasion, with damage reported across cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Sumy and Mykolaiv.
The drone strike therefore damaged a place tied not just to Ukraine’s scientific past, but to a research system that is still operating in the middle of the country’s war.