Ukraine war names get another crack at Nobel Peace prize

Nominees to the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize are back in this year’s award

Ukraine’s president, Russian opposition politicians and the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

These shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize last year are back as influential people start the nomination ball rolling for the 2023 awards.

Nominees submitted to the Norwegian Nobel Committee are kept secret as per the awards’ rules, but the people who nominate them are free to reveal the names.

Lawmaker Christian Tybring-Gjedde, from Norway’s populist party, hinted on Facebook shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February that he would nominate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and fellow Norwegian and NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg who is leading the Western military alliance in its most challenging period.

Opponents of Putin, who ordered the invasion and occupation of eastern Ukraine, plus attacks on other Ukrainian cities, were also nominated: anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was the victim of a poisoning attack, and journalist and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who claims to have survived two poisonings.

Kara-Murza “is taking part in the most important political fight to put an end to the war in Ukraine and guarantee Europe’s future peace,” Ingjerd Schou, the Norwegian lawmaker who nominated Kara-Murza, told Norwegian agency NTB.

The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winners were organizations from three nations figuring in the war in Ukraine: Russian human rights group Memorial — which Moscow ordered dissolved — Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties and jailed Belarusian rights advocate Ales Bialiatski.

In 2021, another thorn in the Kremlin’s side, Dmitry Muratov, chief editor of leading independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, shared the prize with the Philippines’ Maria Ressa for their fight for freedom of expression in their respective countries.

The Nobel committee now faces a challenge of its own posed by the current nominees.

It risks appearing “Eurocentric,” the head of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Henrik Urdal, said.