Ukraine was invaded by Russian military forces in February 2022. In response, the European Mammal Foundation issued a statement unequivocally condemning Russian aggression and offering sympathy and support to Ukraine. We also suspended cooperation with our Russian colleagues and, later in 2022, extended our project for one year.

The purpose of the suspension, rather than immediate expulsion, was to allow us some time to see if the situation improved or whether some way of continuing scientific cooperation in time of war could be found. Sadly, this destructive and unnecessary war continues unabated and, despite the best efforts of the EMF, over a considerable period, to find an acceptable way forward, scientific cooperation between Russia and Ukraine in such circumstances has proved impossible. We can understand that. With great regret, therefore, the EMF, in consultation with the atlas Steering Group, has decided to abandon our original scientific objective of mapping mammal distributions across the whole of geographic Europe and will now exclude the Russian part of that area from our project.

Having excluded Russia, EMMA2 will now map the whole of the EMMA1 area plus Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine. This will allow us to extend the area mapped eastwards by about 1000km, so covering a good proportion of Europe. An atlas with a coherent border that runs down the eastern borders of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine will still be a valuable contribution to the study and conservation of mammals.

European Mammal Foundation,
March 2023