The Norwegian committee had a target when it unveiled this year’s Nobel Peace Prize in the midst of the war in Ukraine: Russian President Vladimir Putin. And yesterday, at the awards ceremony in Oslo, the laureates did not fail to attack the Kremlin’s strongman and Russia’s “imperialist aspirations” with their attacks.
“The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace for an attacked country cannot be achieved by laying down its arms. That would not be peace, but occupation”said the director of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Matviichuk, who told AFP in an interview that she had to write her speech by candlelight because of Russian bombing of her country’s energy infrastructure.
Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, who is detained and represented at the ceremony by his wife Natalia Pinchuk, the Russian non-governmental organization (dissolved by Moscow) Memorial and the Ukrainian Center received this year’s Nobel Prize for “promoting the right to criticize”. the power and protection of citizens’ fundamental rights”.
Matviichuk said in his speech that, in nine months of war, the center has already committed “more than 27,000” war crimes, admitting that this is “just the tip of the iceberg”. The director of the Ukrainian center, founded in 2007, recalled that “war turns people into numbers”, arguing that it is necessary “to name all victims of war crimes”. He also reiterated the idea that an international court is needed to try Putin and other “war criminals”.
That is what the director of the Russian NGO Memorial, Yan Rachinsky, said any act of defiance in Russia is called “fascism” and that it has become the “ideological justification for the insane and criminal war in Ukraine”. Rachinsky did not mince words, despite the hefty prison sentences currently imposed on anyone who openly criticizes the invasion.
In an interview with the BBC, before accepting the prize, he also revealed that he had been advised by the Kremlin to refuse the Nobel Peace Prize, as the other laureates were considered “inappropriate”. The NGO director also criticized his country’s “imperialist aspirations”, inherited from the former Soviet Union, “which still thrive”.
Memorial, founded in 1989 to expose the crimes of Stalin’s regime, was dissolved by a decision of the Russian Supreme Court late last year. “Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia is more than the total in the entire Soviet Union at the beginning of the perestroika period in the 1980s,” he said.
The third recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize this year is Belarusian Ales Bialiatski, 60, founder of the NGO Viasna – the fourth to receive the prize in prison. At the ceremony, he was represented by his wife, who was not even allowed to write a speech.
in Ukraine, Russia wants to “establish a slave dictatorship, the same as in Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored, with Russian military bases, a great economic dependence, a Russification of culture and language”, said Natalia Pinchuk. Bialiatski, detained since July 2021, is awaiting trial in which he could be sentenced to 12 years in prison for “smuggling” money to the opposition.
Source: DN
