OSLO—Jailed Belarusian activist Ales Byalyatski, Russian rights group Memorial, and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The award, the first peace prize since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, has echoes of the Cold War era, when prominent Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn won Nobels for peace or literature.
The prize will be seen by many as a condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, making it one of the most politically contentious in decades.
“We believe that it is a war that is a result of an authoritarian regime, aggressively committing an act of aggression,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen told Reuters after the announcement….