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The Swedish foundation that awards the Nobel prizes announced on Thursday that it would once again invite representatives of Russia and Belarus to the awards ceremony in Stockholm in December. The two countries were excluded from the event last year due to their role in the invasion of Ukraine, and the decision to readmit them has raised many disputes in Sweden and beyond.
Finally, on Saturday, the Nobel Foundation announced that it had changed its mind and decided to exclude them again this year together with Iran, which, like Belarus, is an ally of Russia and has supplied it with arms.
On Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson commented on the decision to readmit Russia and Belarus to the Nobel ceremony saying he was very surprised, and that he would not have done the same thing. In recent days many Swedish politicians from different parties had in turn spoken out against the Foundation’s decision and had announced that they would boycott the ceremony by not participating in it. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko had spoken of the “sense of impunity” that Russia could have deduced from such a decision.
Initially, the director of the Nobel Foundation Vidar Helgesen had justified the decision to widen the invitations by saying that he wanted to celebrate “the importance of free science, a free culture and free and peaceful societies” and that he wanted to counter the tendency to reduce “the dialogue between those who have different opinions. In Saturday’s statement, however, the Foundation explained that it had changed its mind due to the “strong reactions” aroused by the announcement.
The representatives of the three countries will in any case be invited to the ceremony to be held in Oslo, Norway, for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has always been separate from the one dedicated to the other prizes held in Stockholm.
On Friday, Russia’s Justice Ministry added journalist Dmitry Muratov, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner and editor of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, to the list of so-called “foreign agents”, a formula that under Russian law indicates people or organizations that according to the government receive funds from abroad to carry out anti-government activities and which in fact is used to repress freedom of the press and not only. However, there are no elements to say whether the Nobel Foundation’s change of mind is in any way linked to this fact.