Why One of Three Nobel Peace Prize Winners Wouldn’t Talk to Her Colleague This French General and Ukraine Expert ‘Admires the Swiss Army’

A Ukrainian, a Russian and the wife of an imprisoned Belarusian stand together on a podium to receive one of the most prestigious awards of all. They don’t exchange a look or a word. The fronts seem hardened even on this stage far from the military front in Ukraine. And that despite the fact that the three are honored for the same thing: their fight for human rights in former Soviet states.

The scene took place last Saturday night during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. The winners are Oleksandra Matviychuk, Jan Rachinsky and Ales Byaljazki (represented by his wife Natalya Pinchuk).

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Oleksandra Matviychuk / Center for Civil Liberties

Born in what is now Ukraine in 1983, Matviychuk witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a child. That was also why she went to law school with a focus on human rights, she told the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom.

The human rights activist coordinates the “Euromaidan SOS” project to help search for protesters who have been missing since the 2013/14 Euromaidan protests.

In addition, Matviychuk was the initiator of the global initiative “Save Oleg Sentsov”, which campaigned for the release of illegally imprisoned people in Russia and the occupied territories of Crimea. Meetings were held synchronously in more than 30 countries and demands were made of their own governments, “not some abstract Putin,” as she says in an interview with Der Spiegel. The initiative was successful: Sentsow and 34 other prisoners were released.

Since 2007, she has headed the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), which was established with the aim of promoting the values ​​of human rights, democracy and solidarity in Ukraine.

In her speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, she talks about the war in Ukraine:

The CCL has been documenting human rights violations on the ground since the outbreak of war. There are always tensions caused by different interests, as Matwijtschuk told Die Zeit. With Bucha, for example, you saw that the public interest in the atrocities committed by the Russians in the village near Kiev was rightly great. However, journalists and volunteers entered the Butscha crime scene and destroyed key evidence, devastating the CCL’s work.

Matwijtschuk also talks to “Zeit” about how difficult it is to get witnesses: “Some people are very aggressive, others are terrified. Others are grieving,” she says. However, the CCL is not concerned with solving cases. a war crime: rape and sexual assault, because with these victims you would only do more damage without proper training.

Matviychuk, faced with the most horrific atrocities committed by the Russian occupiers, despite all the horrors of war, warns against making political concessions to Russia simply to end the war quickly:

If the attacked country lays down its arms, it is equivalent to an occupation, she says. And she praises her compatriots in front of the assembled Nobel Prize community and asks the world for solidarity with Ukraine:

The 39-year-old refused to give joint interviews with Jan Rachinsky during the Nobel Prize ceremony. Because the Ukrainian voices need to be heard now and Rachinsky is Russian, her reasoning is.

Jan Rachinsky / Memorial

Jan Rachinsky is the head of the human rights organization Memorial, which was declared a “foreign agent” in Russia in 2014 and then formally dissolved. But the activists keep working.

Memorial was originally established in the late 1980s to document crimes against humanity under Stalin and help surviving victims and their families.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, Memorial has also been committed to the politically persecuted and to democratic values ​​in Russia. Over time, research and education projects, an archive and online database, and memorials were created.

Information about the human rights situation in Russia is processed in the Memorial Human Rights Centre. The Russian government has repeatedly challenged the results of Memorial’s investigations, but they enjoy wide international recognition.

Rachinsky said of the war in Ukraine on Saturday:

Ahead of the awards ceremony, Rachinsky gave an interview to the BBC in which he said that Russian authorities had asked him to reject the Nobel Prize because the three laureates “didn’t mix”. Rachinsky, on the other hand, saw the decision to award the prize to winners in three different countries as proof “that civil society is not divided by national borders”. But he testifies in his speech:

By the way, Matviychuk respects Memorial and Rachinsky. She told the BBC that the organization has been helping Ukrainians for years and continues to do so.

Ales Byalyatski / Viasna

Ales Bjalyazki is described by the ARD as a “man of conviction”. In any case, he is so convinced of his fight for human rights that he is currently – not for the first time – in prison in his native Belarus. His wife, Natalia Pinchuk, accepted the Nobel Prize in her husband’s place and said during her speech:

In 1996 Byalyatsky founded the organization Vyazna to document human rights violations under the regime of Alexander Lukashenko and to support and give a voice to political prisoners. In 2003, Vyazna was dissolved by the Belarus Supreme Court, but that did not stop Byalyatski and his team from continuing.

Lukashenko had Vyazna’s offices and Byalyatsky’s apartment searched and in 2011 he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for alleged tax evasion. In 2021 he was arrested again and imprisoned. And the persecution continues: Politically motivated charges have recently been filed against several other Vyazna activists.

But Byaljazki doesn’t seem impressed. He has repeatedly claimed from prison that his struggle will continue – whether behind bars or at liberty.

And Oleksandra Matvijtschuk also says she will continue. Then: