Legal and organizational foundations of scientific and technological cooperation between Russia and Cuba

The subject of the research is the legal and organizational foundations of Russian-Cuban international scientific and technological cooperation (ISTC), which create the necessary institutional conditions for its functioning and development. The aim of the research is to form comprehensive representations of the system of legal and organizational foundations of Russian-Cuban ISTC. The article analyzes the subsystem of international legal instruments of both general and special nature that enshrine the principles, forms, and directions of bilateral ISTC, as well as define the activities of organizational structures that carry out its coordination. The author also conducted an extensive study of the subsystem of horizontal agreements concluded between scientific and scientific-educational centers and institutions of the two countries. Such agreements create a regulatory environment that facilitates the implementation of relevant international legal obligations. Great attention was paid to the argumentation of the thesis that Russian-Cuban ISTC fully reflects the general regularity that ISTC intersects with international educational (academic) and industrial-technological cooperation. The methodological basis of the research includes the following methods and approaches: systemic and historical approaches, formal-dogmatic and comparative-legal methods, and forecasting methods. The main conclusion of the research is the statement that the system of legal and organizational support for bilateral Russian-Cuban ISTC has a mature form and includes all the main components that create a favorable environment for the development of interaction between the two countries. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it presents, for the first time in scholarly literature, a comprehensive analysis of the regulatory-legal and organizational-structural subsystems underlying the regulation of bilateral activities in the development and implementation of Russian-Cuban cooperative projects in the field of science, technology, and innovation. The contribution of the article to the subject area is the disclosure of the specifics of the influence of geopolitical factors on the formation, functioning, and improvement of the legal and organizational foundations of Russian-Cuban ISTC, as well as on the very process of implementing this interaction.