Yan Rachinsky, who heads Memorial, the oldest civil rights group in Russia, was told by Russian government authorities not to accept this year’s Nobel Peace Prize because the other two recipients — Ukrainian human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and imprisoned Belarus human rights defender Ales Bialiatski — were deemed “inappropriate.”
As a sign of how fraught that part of the world is, Ms. Matviichuk refused to be interviewed with Mr. Rachinsky because of the war. Matviichuk said she admired Rachinsky but wanted the credit for the Nobel Prize to shine on Ukraine.
Mykhailo Podolyak, the adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office, said the prize actually advanced Putin’s narrative about the war.
“Awarding three human rights organizations from three countries does not answer the question of protecting peace, but openly promotes the destructive thesis about the same notorious ‘trinity of the Slavic peoples’ that Russian propaganda constantly talks about in global public opinion,” he told Politico.
Ukrainian journalist Olga Rudenko, chief editor of the Kyiv Independent, claims that “This is an extremely insensitive move at times when Russians are killing Ukrainians with the help of Belarusians.”
While aiming for peace, the committee’s decision has triggered undeserved hate against the local laureates, Ukrainian women’s and LGBTQ+ rights activist Olena Shevchenko said.
Some people even think that Center for Civil Liberties NGO head Oleksandra Matviychuk’s decision to accept the award with Belarusians and Russians was a sort of betrayal of Ukraine.
“I understood our people’s reaction. It is too painful for them, it is too painful for me,” Matviychuk told POLITICO. “But we have to take every opportunity, every award to talk about Ukraine, to bring justice.”
In other words, just your typical controversy over the peace prize.
Two things all the prize winners agree on: Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, and Russia must answer for its violations of the laws of war.
“Peace is impossible without justice. And justice is impossible without judiciary,” head of Ukraine’s presidential office Andriy Yermak said in Wednesday’s message directed at the White House. “To start a criminal and unprovoked war is to open the door to thousands of crimes of various levels committed during hostilities and in the occupied territory.”
Jan Rachinsky of Memorial said in his speech that “today’s sad state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved past.”
He particularly denounced the Kremlin’s attempts to denigrate the history, statehood and independence of Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, saying that it “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,” Rachinsky said. “Now, the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.”
It takes real guts to stand up and say you’re being oppressed while someone with a gun is telling you to sit down. Kudos to the three winners, even though none of them can stand to be in the same room with each other.
“In today’s Russia, no-one’s personal safety can be guaranteed,” Rachinsky said. “Yes, many have been killed. But we know what impunity of the state leads to… We need to get out of this pit somehow.”
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