Nobel Peace Prize winners denounce Russia’s war in Ukraine | 24CA News
The winners of this 12 months’s Nobel Peace Prize from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia shared their visions of a fairer world and denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s struggle in Ukraine throughout Saturday’s awards ceremony in Oslo, Norway.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights lawyer who heads Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties, dismissed requires a political compromise that may permit Russia to retain a number of the illegally annexed Ukrainian territories, saying that “fighting for peace does not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”
“Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” she stated, her voice trembling with emotion. “This would not be peace, but occupation.”
Matviichuk repeated her earlier name for Putin — and Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s authoritarian president, who supplied his nation’s territory for Russian troops to invade Ukraine — to face a global tribunal.
“We have to prove that the rule of law does work, and justice does exist, even if they are delayed,” she stated.
Matviichuk was named a co-winner of the 2022 peace prize in October with Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski of Belarus, head of the Viasna Human Rights Centre. Later on Saturday, the opposite Nobel prizes will likely be formally introduced throughout a ceremony in Stockholm.
Activist stays jailed in Belarus
Bialiatski, 60, was detained following protests in 2020 in opposition to the re-election of Lukashenko. He has remained in jail pending trial and faces as much as 12 years in jail if convicted. Bialiatski wasn’t allowed to ship his speech. He shared a couple of ideas when he met in jail along with his spouse, Natallia Pinchuk, who spoke on his behalf on the ceremony.
“In my homeland, the entirety of Belarus is in a prison,” Bialiatski stated within the remarks delivered by Pinchuk — referring 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 friends, all civic activists, tens of thousands of Belarusians who have gone through beatings, torture, arrests, prison.”
Bialiatski is the fourth particular person within the 121-year historical past of the Nobel Prize to obtain the award whereas in jail or detention.
In the remarks delivered by his spouse, he forged Lukashenko as a device of Putin, saying the Russian chief is searching for to determine his domination throughout the ex-Soviet lands.
“I know exactly what kind of Ukraine would suit Russia and Putin — a dependent dictatorship,” he stated. “The same as today’s Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded.”
The triple peace prize award was seen as a powerful 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.
As a part of efforts to silence voices vital of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has gone to court docket to try to shut down Memorial International, Russia’s most distinguished human rights group.
Russia’s Supreme Court shut down Memorial, one of many nation’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.
Prior to that, the Russian authorities had declared the group a “foreign agent” — a label that suggests further authorities scrutiny and carries sturdy pejorative connotations that may discredit the focused group.
Yan Rachinsky of Memorial described the Russian aggression in opposition to its neighbour as a “monstrous burden,” however he strongly rejected the notion of “national guilt.” He stated the notion of collective guilt is abhorrent to elementary human rights rules.”
Putin bent on ‘conquering’
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Saturday that the Russian president is determined to conquer parts of Ukraine and shows no restraint in his brutality. However, Scholz said it’s still important to keep contacts open in case a moment arrives to end the war.
“Whenever I converse with Putin, he says very clearly that for him it’s about conquering one thing,” Scholz said at an event in Potsdam, near Berlin. “He merely desires to beat a part of Ukrainian territory with violence.”
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Scholz has spoken directly with Putin more than most other Western leaders since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. The two last spoke by telephone for an hour on Dec. 2.
The German chancellor said it was not clear how many Russian soldiers had died so far in the invasion, but the number could be as high as 100,000.
“We have seen the brutality the Russian president is able to. In Chechnya the place he principally eradicated the entire nation. Or in Syria. There is not any restraint there, it is so simple as that,” Scholz said.
“We are of utterly completely different opinions. Nonetheless I’ll hold talking with him as a result of I need to expertise the second the place it’s doable to get out of this case. And that is not doable with out talking with each other.”
