Nobel honors for Putin’s critics NYT - Ukraine-Russia News - October 7 , 2022

 

October 7, 2022

By Carole Landry Editor/Writer, Briefings Team

Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, your guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict.

Russia launched missile attacks against civilian targets in the south after President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had retaken almost 200 square miles of territory there in less than a week. Russia’s military leadership — including the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu — is facing growing criticism from supporters of the war. President Biden said the risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” was at the highest level since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. President Vladimir Putin spent his 70th birthday with little public celebration. The president of Belarus gave him a tractor. Get the latest updates here. Track the invasion with our maps.

Memorial’s archives at the office of the rights group in Moscow.Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Nobel honors for Putin’s critics

Human rights defenders in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus won the Nobel Peace Prize today in what was widely seen as a rebuke to Putin.

The laureates — Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarusian activist; Memorial, a Russian organization; and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine — were honored as “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence,” the Nobel Committee said.

“The Peace Prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the committee chair. “They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power.”

Memorial is one of Russia’s most respected rights groups, co-founded in the 1980s by Andrei Sakharov, also a Nobel Peace laureate, to document crimes of the Soviet era. The Kremlin outlawed the group last year.

As the prize was announced, staff members were in a Moscow courtroom fighting a government order to seize the group’s assets. As expected, the judge ruled against them.

The Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine was cited for its “pioneering role” in efforts to document Russian war crimes since the invasion began. The Center was founded in 2007 to promote democracy and the rule of law in Ukraine, but its focus has shifted during the war to seek justice and accountability for crimes committed by Russian troops.

Bialiatski, who helped found and lead the rights group Viasna in Belarus, was arrested last July as part of a brutal crackdown on dissent that unfolded after huge street protests erupted in 2020, demanding an end to President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s rule.

Natalia Satsunkevich, a Viasna activist who now lives in exile, told Dozhd, an online Russian television channel that operates from abroad, that Bialiatski was being held in “inhuman conditions” in a decrepit prison.

Awarding him the Peace Prize, along with recipients from Ukraine and Russia, she said, was “very symbolic” and highlighted “how closely these countries are now connected by war.”

Several observers noted that Memorial was receiving the award on an auspicious date: Putin’s 70th birthday and the 16th anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who chronicled the crimes of Putin’s rule.

Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted on Twitter: “On Putin’s 70th birthday, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a Russian human rights group that he shut down, a Ukrainian human rights group that is documenting his war crimes, and a Belarusian human rights activist whom his ally Lukashenko has imprisoned.”

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Ukrainian soldiers at a checkpoint with a recently donated American .50-caliber machine gun near the village of Vilne Pole.Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

The ‘Wild West’ of arms sales

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration has fast-tracked private arms sales to Ukraine, slashing a weekslong approval process to a matter of hours. In just the first four months of the year, the State Department authorized more than $300 million in private deals to Ukraine.

That has helped open another stream of weapons to Ukraine, but it has also drawn new players into the shadowy market — like Martin Zlatev, who formerly owned a limousine company in the St. Louis suburbs, and his partner, Heather Gjorgjievski, an osteopath.

Zlatev and Gjorgjievski were working on a deal to sell $30 million worth of rockets, grenade launchers and ammunition to the Ukrainian military, my colleague Justin Scheck reported.

But after The Times asked Zlatev’s lawyer and the Ukrainian government why the deal relied on falsified documents to evade foreign export laws, the lawyer said the deal was off.

“It’s the Wild West,” said Olga Torres, a lawyer who represents arms exporters and serves on the federal Defense Trade Advisory Group. “We are seeing a lot of people who were previously not involved in arms sales getting involved now because they see the opportunity.”

More on weapons: Ukrainian officials are asking the U.S. for long-range missiles, but the Pentagon says the ones it has provided are powerful enough.

What else we’re following

To provide comprehensive coverage of the war, we often link to outside sources. Some of these require a subscription.

In Ukraine

The police in Kharkiv recovered 534 bodies in territory recaptured since early September and discovered 22 locations that they suspect were used as torture chambers.

Around the world

Swedish investigators said that the leaks in the Nord Stream gas pipelines were caused by detonations that they strongly suspect were acts of sabotage. China, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, is a wild card in the West’s energy war with Russia. Two Russians traveled on a small boat to a small island in Alaska this week and requested asylum, apparently to avoid being called up to fight in Ukraine. The U.N. human rights council voted to appoint an independent human rights expert to report on Russia. The war loomed large this week over the German debut of Utopia, an orchestra whose founder has faced scrutiny over his ties to Russia.

We also recommend

After months in the trenches never seeing the enemy’s faces, Ukrainian soldiers are engaging the Russians up close. “We have only one month to do this right now, because right now they are in panic,” a commander said. Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back Monday. — Carole