Nobel Peace Prize winners blast Russian invasion of Ukraine, requires Putin and Belarus president to face worldwide tribunalDecember 10, 2022

The winners of this 12 months’s Nobel Peace Prize from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine shared their visions of a fairer world and denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warfare in Ukraine throughout Saturday’s award ceremony.

Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Heart for Civil Liberties dismissed requires a political compromise that will permit Russia to retain among the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories, saying that “preventing for peace doesn’t imply yielding to stress of the aggressor, it means defending folks from its cruelty.”

“Peace can’t be reached by a rustic below assault laying down its arms,” she mentioned, her voice trembling with emotion. “This may not be peace, however occupation.”

Matviichuk repeated her earlier name for Putin – and Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who offered his nation’s territory for Russian troops to invade Ukraine – to face a global tribunal.

“We have now to show that the rule of regulation does work, and justice does exist, even when they’re delayed,” she mentioned.

Matviichuk was named a co-winner of the 2022 peace prize in October together with Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna. Afterward Saturday, the opposite Nobel prizes might be formally offered throughout a ceremony in Stockholm.

Bialiatski, who’s jailed in Belarus pending his trial and faces a jail sentence of as much as 12 years, wasn’t allowed to ship his speech. He shared just a few ideas when he met in jail together with his spouse, Natallia Pinchuk, who spoke on his behalf on the award ceremony.

“In my homeland, everything of Belarus is in a jail,” Bialiatski mentioned within the remarks delivered by Pinchuk – in reference to a sweeping crackdown on the opposition after huge protests in opposition to an August 2020 fraud-tainted vote that Lukashenko used to increase his rule. “This award belongs to all my human rights defender pals, all civic activists, tens of 1000’s of Belarusians who’ve gone via beatings, torture, arrests, jail.”

Bialiatski is the fourth particular person within the 121-year historical past of the Nobel Prizes to obtain the award whereas in jail or detention.

Within the remarks delivered by his spouse, he forged Lukashenko as a instrument of Putin, saying the Russian chief is in search of to determine his domination throughout the ex-Soviet lands.

“I do know precisely what sort of Ukraine would go well with Russia and Putin – a dependent dictatorship,” he mentioned. “The identical as at this time’s Belarus, the place the voice of the oppressed folks is ignored and disregarded.”

The triple peace prize award was seen as a robust rebuke to Putin, not just for his motion in Ukraine however for the Kremlin’s crackdown on home opposition and its assist for Lukashenko’s brutal repression of dissenters.

Russia’s Supreme Courtroom shut down Memorial, one in all Russia’s oldest and most distinguished human rights organizations that was broadly acclaimed for its research of political repression within the Soviet Union, in December 2021.

Previous to that, the Russian authorities had declared the group a “international agent” – a label that means further authorities scrutiny and carries robust pejorative connotations that may discredit the focused group.

Jan Rachinsky of Memorial mentioned in his speech that “at this time’s unhappy state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved previous.”

He notably denounced the Kremlin’s makes an attempt to denigrate the historical past, statehood and independence of Ukraine and different ex-Soviet nations, saying that it “grew to become the ideological justification for the insane and prison warfare of aggression in opposition to Ukraine.”

“One of many first victims of this insanity was the historic reminiscence of Russia itself,” Rachinsky mentioned. “Now, the Russian mass media consult with the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighbouring nation, the annexation of territories, terror in opposition to civilians within the occupied areas, and warfare crimes as justified by the necessity to combat fascism.”

Whereas all of the winners spoke in unison to sentence the warfare in Ukraine, there additionally have been some marked variations.

Matviichuk particularly declared that “the Russian folks might be accountable for this disgraceful web page of their historical past and their want to forcefully restore the previous empire.”

Rachinsky described the Russian aggression in opposition to its neighbour as a “monstrous burden,” however strongly rejected the notion of “nationwide guilt.”

“It’s not price speaking about ‘nationwide’ or every other collective guilt in any respect – the notion of collective guilt is abhorrent to basic human rights rules,” he mentioned. “The joint work of the contributors of our motion is predicated on a totally totally different ideological foundation – on the understanding of civic accountability for the previous and for the current.”