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The leading US-based business school accreditation agency last week allowed a top Moscow management school official to attend its annual conference, in a sign of a thaw in relations with Russian institutions frozen out after Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine.
The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) allowed Violetta Grigorieva, an executive director at Moscow’s Skolkovo School of Management, to attend the International Conference and Annual Meeting (ICAM) in Vienna, although her name and her institution were not on an official list of attendees.
Her participation sparked alarm from other participants at the conference, which is attended by hundreds of delegates from business schools and related organisations around the world, and anger from the Kyiv School of Economics, an AACSB member.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv school, said he would be filing a complaint with AACSB. “This might not be a legal violation but the job of an association is to show moral leadership and clarity,” he said.
“Russians are pretty good at playing this card of being friends and saying they are not engaged in politics, but Skolkovo is training people who go on to work in Russian defence companies making drones that are killing us,” he added.
In response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the AACSB swiftly suspended accreditation and membership of Russian institutions, in a common position with Equis, the other leading global business school accreditation body, as well as the Association of MBAs and the Business Graduates Association.
The Global Network for Advanced Management, a network of 32 international business schools also suspended Skolkovo.
Lily Bi, chief executive of the AACSB, said: “I can confirm that our policies have not changed.”
Skolkovo is not a member of the AACSB and is not directly controlled by the Russian government, but it is closely linked to the state, including through its powerful business oligarch backers.
Several of the business school’s faculty fled in 2022 including Yuri Levin, the dean, who said at the time: “I believe that any war is against human reason and human nature, especially when this war is between neighbours.”
Grigorieva told the FT that anyone could attend the ICAM conference, and added that Skolkovo was “private, not-for-profit and beyond politics”. She added that “we remain the bridge to the world for our students and are open to all global peers”.
