Two representatives of Russian institutions that won the Nobel Peace Prize and an analyst came to Brazil to explain the situation in Russia and why the peace proposal of the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), as it is formulated, cannot thrive.
They reject the idea of a peace agreement without preconditions, that is, without demanding that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine or that war crimes committed by Russians be tried and punished.
“I don’t understand this position that both sides are responsible,” he told CNN Kirill Martynov, from the newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021.
“Provide evidence that Ukraine provoked, started or wanted this war. It’s stupid to want to play real politik and assume that Russia is so important that we have to say that Ukraine also has responsibility.”
“Considering war crimes, we have to want peace with preconditions,” argued Martynov. These crimes must be judged. The only sustainable way to peace is for Russia to withdraw from the occupied territories. But it is important for a large country like Brazil to say that it is not happy with the war.”
“Novaya Gazeta” had to close its operations in Russia because of censorship, which already existed before, but was intensified after the invasion, in February of last year.
Martynov, like much of the newspaper’s staff, is in exile in Riga, Latvia. They run a news site and manage to bypass the censorship block through VPN (virtual private network), Telegram and YouTube, the only social network not banned in Russia.
According to Martynov, the regime does not want to come into conflict with Google, which owns YouTube, because 80% of Russians use the Android platform, which belongs to the company, and if it withdraws from Russia, the internet would collapse.
Pavel Andreev, who is on the board of the human rights organization Memorial, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, said about the Brazilian position: “I understand that [a questão dos] human rights is an argument that does not work for China, but should be important for Brazil. Brazil should ask itself what it wants”.
Memorial continues to operate within Russia, thanks to its network structure, with hundreds of independent collaborators spread across the country. But the court ordered the closure of its
headquarters, at the request of the Attorney General’s Office, in December 2021, when Russian forces surrounded Ukraine and prepared to invade.
“We can’t work normally anymore,” said Andreev, who lives in the Russian countryside. “To work as an institution, we have to call war a ‘special operation’.” He compares the environment in Russia to that described in the book “1984”, by George Orwell, in which “Big Brother” sought to control the population’s thinking.
“Civil society lives like a cell phone in battery-saving mode,” notes Andreev. “The first priority is to protect yourself. The second, save independent institutions. And the third, try to help as many people as possible. Many Russians help Ukrainian refugees.”
“I do not think that this mediation [do Brasil] will work because anything that allows [Vladimir] Putin [presidente da Rússia] keeping what he occupied will benefit him and it is exactly what he wants”, evaluates the Russian journalist and analyst Konstantin Eggert.
“I think that, for now, neither side will accept mediation. Ukrainians think Russians
they should leave Ukraine and go back to their 1991 borders.”
Eggert praises the fact that Brazil voted at the UN to condemn Russia. “But frankly a founding member country of the United Nations, which wrote the UN Charter, including the article on self-defence, should understand Ukraine’s suffering. She is the victim of unprovoked aggression. It’s a war we haven’t seen in Europe for 80 years.”
The Russian journalist went into exile in Vilnius, Lithuania, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, because he says he saw what was coming next.
He states: “In Europe we paid the price of more than 100 million dead in two world wars to understand one thing: there is no peace at any price. Peace always has a price. And the only lasting peace is peace with justice, dignity and respect for victims. I think any mediation that is not based on that will fail.”
The three met with Ambassador Carlos Cozendey, Secretary for Multilateral Political Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the head of the Special Advisory Office for International Affairs at the Ministry of Human Rights, Carla Martins Solon, with André Mendonça, Minister of the Federal Supreme Court ( STF), and with Carlos Alberto Coelho, Federal Attorney for Citizens’ Rights.
A CNN found that the representatives of the ministries took a position of listening, implying that the Brazilian mediation initiative is still in the elaboration phase. They talked
with the Russians at lunch in Brasília, on Monday (13).
Source: CNN Brasil
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