For the founder of the NGO Memorial, Lev Ponomarev, this Nobel Peace Prize “should be awarded to people who are behind bars in Russia” who were “very critical of power and they knew they would be imprisoned .”
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“Putin is absolute evil” and “a threat to humanity”, reacts on franceinfo the founder of the NGO Memorial, Lev Ponomarev, rewarded today by the Nobel Peace Prize. A joint award with Belarusian human rights activist Ales Beliatski and the Ukrainian NGO Center for Civil Liberties.
franceinfo: What is the feeling that dominates after receiving this Nobel Prize?
Lev Ponomarev: I am happy that Memorial received this award. But every year, I tell myself that this prize should be awarded to people who are behind bars in Russia. Including three people who are a little apart because they are political leaders, people who knowingly took a risk. There is Alexeï Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Mourza and Ilia Iachine. They were very critical of power and they knew they would be imprisoned.
“We must also save the hostages of the system in Russia. A prize like the Nobel increases the value of the hostages and makes it possible to increase the possibility of exchanging them or releasing them.”
Lev Ponomarev, founder of the NGO Memorialat franceinfo
Of course Memorial deserves its Nobel Prize. But it would be nice if there were two versions of the award: one for personalities and one for organizations.
This Nobel Prize is also for Putin. What do you think his reaction will be?
He will definitely be irritated. Once again, it is said that in Russia rights are violently violated. But there will be nothing but a form of irritation in him. For some time, Putin has passed a milestone. He now represents absolute evil.
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Your NGO has done a lot of work on the history of political repression in Russia. Can we draw a parallel between the era of Putin and the Soviet era?
There are many. In Soviet times under Stalin, it was even more atrocious than today. People were killed and shot without trial. But Putin is taking the same path: there are more and more unconstitutional laws. Certainly, so far, we do not shoot. But you can be sentenced to long prison terms for lyrics or criticism. Sentencing someone to twenty years in prison is like killing a person. Stalin exterminated inside the country. Putin is dangerous for the whole world. In a way, it’s worse. It is a threat to humanity.