V arying degrees of poor governance, disregard of human rights, weak or nonexistent rule-oflaw regimes, and widespread corruption are common to many countries. When these conditions permeate scientific practices, they represent risks to the integrity of science and for human research subjects. These challenges to the research enterprise are not new, but the current situation of the Russian Federation, in light of the events that have developed since the invasion of Ukraine, is unique. The invasion has led to the imposition of economic sanctions intended to isolate Russia from much of global commerce, which implicitly includes the medical research enterprise. The prospect of ongoing isolation of Russia's substantial research enterprise raises issues related to but distinct from the more familiar problem of corruption.Not since the establishment of what political scientists describe as the rules-based international order following World War II has a major power been isolated from the global research community. In principle, research with human subjects should be performed in places where societal oversight is possible through the instruments provided by democracy, including the free flow of information between scientific organizations, their members, and the media. However, some of the locations most in need of new interventions may be marked by local corruption. Unless the corruption is so pervasive as to make it impracticable to obtain valid results that could provide benefits for the population, it is inappropriate to discriminate among venues for clinical studies based on their national governance models alone. Indeed, even during the Cold War, clinical trials in the Eastern European communist states seem to have operated consistently with the conventions of the day. The German historian of medicine Volker Hess has documented hundreds of studies conducted in the former East Germany under the sponsorship of Western drug companies. In the late 1950s, the United States approved the Sabin polio vaccine following testing in the Soviet Union involving millions of children. 1 As of 2021, the Russian Federation does not rank exceptionally high in a widely recognized scale of corruption. According to Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark is the "cleanest" country, with a score of 88 out of 100. Russia scores 29, ranking 136th out of the 180 countries in the index.