Cornell University
A letter signed by 163 Nobel Prize laureates, and drafted by Cornell Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, was released March 1, condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and expressing support for the Ukrainian people and the country.
Roald Hoffmann
“In a move that recalls the infamous attack of Nazi Germany on Poland in 1939 and on the Soviet Union in 1941, the government of the Russian Federation, led by President Putin, has launched an unprovoked military aggression – nothing else but a war – against its neighbor, Ukraine,” the letter states. “We choose our words carefully here, for we do not believe the Russian people have a role in this aggression. We join in condemning these military actions and President Putin’s essential denial of the legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence.”
Hoffmann, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, won the 1981 Nobel in chemistry. He was born in 1937 into a Polish Jewish family in a part of Poland that became part of Ukraine after World War II. During that war, a Ukrainian family hid Hoffmann’s family from the Nazis – a family Hoffmann and his children still visit.