This year's Nobel Peace Prize winners said today at the presentation ceremony in Oslo that they should not lay down their arms in the "crazy and criminal" war waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, because that would not be peace but an occupation.
Belarusian activist Ales Belyatsky in prison in his country, the Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, which was disbanded by the Russian authorities, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, received the Nobel Peace Prize for their commitment to respect for human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence against authoritarian forces.
"The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace for a country under attack cannot be achieved by laying down arms. That would not be peace, but occupation," said the head of the Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Matviychuk.
She said before the ceremony that she was writing her speech by candlelight because of the power outage due to the bombing in Ukraine.
Oleksandra Matviychuk, speaking with a voice full of emotions, called for the formation of "an international court in which Putin, the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and other war criminals would be tried."
The President of the Memorial, Ian Rachinski, said that Putin turned the historical meaning of the anti-fascist struggle in favor of his own political interests.
"Today, the number of political prisoners in Russia is greater than their total number in the entire Soviet Union at the beginning of the perestroika period in the 1980s," Rachinsky said.
The third winner, Beljatski, has been in prison since July 2021. The activist is awaiting trial where he faces a 12-year prison sentence for "smuggling cash" in favor of the opposition. Because of that procedure, Beljatski was forbidden to deliver a speech at the ceremony.
Instead, his wife Natalija Pinčuk spoke, who repeated her husband's words that "an uprising against the international dictatorship" is needed.
Today, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Oslo, and the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Economics were awarded in Stockholm.
The Nobel Prizes exist thanks to the Swedish scientist and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who wanted money to be allocated from his fund each year to contribute to humanity.
In Paris in 1895, a year before his death, Nobel included in his will the desire to establish a Nobel fund from which prizes would be awarded to the most deserving.
The Nobel Prize consists of a gold medal, a diploma and a check for nine million crowns (about one million euros), and the monetary amount of the prize is divided if there are several laureates in one discipline.
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