OSLO—Jailed Belarusian activist Ales Byalyatski, Russian rights group Memorial, and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The award, the first peace prize since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, has echoes of the Cold War era, when prominent Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn won Nobels for peace or literature.
The prize will be seen by many as a condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, making it one of the most politically contentious in decades.
“We believe that it is a war that is a result of an authoritarian regime, aggressively committing an act of aggression,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen told Reuters after the announcement.
She said the committee wanted to honor “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence.”
“It is not one person, one organization, one quick fix,” she said in an interview. “It is the united efforts of what we call civil society that can stand up against authoritarian states and, or, human rights abuses.”
She called on Belarus to release Byalyatski from prison and said the prize was not aimed against Putin.
Belarusian security police in July last year detained Byalyatski, 60, and others in a new crackdown on opponents of Lukashenko.
Authorities had moved to shut down non-state media outlets and human right groups after mass protests the previous August against a presidential election that the opposition said was rigged.
Byalyatski’s wife told Reuters he may not even know of the news, which she tried to break to him in a telegram to a Belarusian prison.
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In Geneva, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said Moscow was not concerned about the award. “We don’t care about this,” Gennady Gatilov told Reuters.
In Belarus, the award was not reported by state media.
Founded in 1989 to help the victims of political repression during the Soviet Union and their relatives, Memorial campaigns for democracy and civil rights in Russia and former Soviet republics. Its co-founder and first leader was Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Memorial, Russia’s best-known human rights group, was ordered to be dissolved last December for breaking a law requiring certain civil society groups to register as foreign agents, capping a year of crackdowns on Kremlin critics the likes of which had not been seen since Soviet days.
Memorial board member Oleg Orlov called the prize a “moral support,” but when asked by reporters if it would help to protect his organization or its work, he said “I fear not.”
The award to Memorial is the second in a row to a Russian person or organization, after the prize last year went to journalist Dmitry Muratov and to Maria Ressa of the Philippines.
The executive director of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, Oleksandra Romantsova, said winning the award was incredible.
“It is great, thank you,” she told the secretary of the award committee, Olav Njoelstad, during a phone call that was filmed and broadcast on Norwegian television.
The group also wrote on Twitter of how proud it was.
The prize will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10.
