OSLO: A trio from the three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine accepted their Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling for an unabated fight against Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” invasion.

Jailed Belarusian rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Russian organisation Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL) were honoured by the Nobel committee for their struggle for “human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence” in the face of authoritarianism.

“The people of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,” the head of the CCL, Oleksandra Matviichuk, said.

Founded in 2007, the CCL has documented war crimes allegedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine. These include shelling residential buildings, churches, schools and hospitals, bombing evacuation corridors, the forced displacement of people, and torture.

Due to the Russian bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Matviichuk had to write her Nobel acceptance speech by candlelight, she said in an interview just hours before the ceremony.

In the nine months since the start of the Russian invasion, the CCL has documented more than 27,000 cases of alleged war crimes, which she said were “only the tip of the iceberg”.

“War turns people into numbers. We have to reclaim the names of all victims of war crimes,” she said in her speech, her voice overcome with emotion. In Oslo’s City Hall decorated with red Siberian flowers, Matviichuk reiterated her appeal for an international tribunal to judge Putin, his ally Belarusian President Alexander Luka­shenko and “other war criminals”.

Her Russian co-laureate Yan Rachinsky, the chairman of the human rights organisation Memorial, meanwhile denounced Russia’s “imperial ambitions” inherited from the ex-Soviet Union “that still thrive today”.

Putin and his “ideological servants” have hijacked the anti-fascist struggle “for their own political interests”, he said.

Now, “resistance to Russia is called ‘fascism’” and has become “the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine”, he said, using harsh language considering the stiff penalties Moscow imposes on those who publicly criticise the invasion.

Founded in 1989, Memorial has for decades shed light on crimes committed by Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian regime, worked to preserve the memory of the victims, and documented human rights violations in Russia. Amid crackdowns on the opposition and media, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered Memorial to dissolve at the end of 2021.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2022