Nobel laureates in Ukraine and Russia criticize Putin’s ‘crazy’ war | News

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The award of the Triple Peace Prize is seen as a strong rebuke of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

After the awards ceremony in Oslo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners took turns criticizing Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

In October, imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatsky, the Russian Memorial organization, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties were announced as winners, recognized for their work documenting war crimes, human rights abuses, and abuses of power.

The Peace Prize is awarded annually on December 10, the day Alfred Nobel died in 1896, and the winners of the roughly $1 million prize will share.

Al Jazeera spoke to Natalia Pinchuk, Bialiatsky’s wife, who attended the ceremony on behalf of her imprisoned husband.

“We all know, Alice, how important and dangerous it is to carry out the mission of civil rights advocates – especially in this tragic time of Russian aggression against Ukraine,” said Pinchuk.

She went on to say that her husband is just one of the thousands of Belarusians unjustly imprisoned for their civic activism and beliefs.

“Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee the country simply because they want to live in a democratic country,” said Pinchuk.

Oleksandra Matveychuk of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties rejected calls for a political settlement that would allow Russia to keep some illegally annexed Ukrainian lands, saying that “Fighting for peace does not mean bowing to pressure from the aggressor, it means protecting people from cruelty.”

“A country under attack cannot reach peace while laying down its arms,” ​​she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “It will not be peace, but occupation.”

Rebuke to Putin

The award of the triple Peace Prize is seen as a staunch rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, not just for his actions in Ukraine, but for the Kremlin’s crackdown on domestic dissent and its support for Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on dissent.

Russia’s Supreme Court shut down Memorial, one of Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organizations that was widely acclaimed for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union, in December 2021.

Prior to this, the Russian government had declared the organization a “foreign agent”—a designation that would draw greater government scrutiny and carry strong pejorative connotations that could tarnish the reputation of the target organization.

“The sad state of civil society in Russia today is a direct consequence of its unresolved past,” said Jan Raczynski of the Memorial Organization in his speech at the ceremony.

He particularly denounced the Kremlin’s attempts to discredit the history, state and independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet states, saying that they “became the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine”.

“One of the first victims of this madness was the historical memory of Russia itself,” said Rachinsky. “Now, the Russian media is referring to the unjustified armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terrorism against civilians in occupied territories, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight against fascism.”

While all of the winners spoke in unison to condemn the war in Ukraine, there were also some distinct differences.

Matveychuk specifically declared that “the Russian people will be responsible for this disgraceful page of their history and for their desire to restore the former empire by force.”

Rachinsky described Russia’s aggression against its neighbor as a “monstrous burden,” but firmly rejected the notion of “national guilt.”

“It’s not worth talking about ‘national’ or any other group guilt at all – the idea of ​​group guilt is abhorrent to basic human rights principles,” he said. “The joint action of the participants in our movement is based on a completely different ideological basis – on an understanding of the civic responsibility of the past and the present.”

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