Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov said on Friday that people in positions of power in Russia are actively promoting the idea of war and conflict with Ukraine is now a distinct possibility.
He said that the powerful promote the idea of war. A war between Russia and Ukraine is not something possible in the heads of some crazy geopoliticians. U.S. officials have said Russia could soon invade Ukraine after a build-up of troops near the Ukrainian border. Moscow has denied it is planning an invasion.
Muratov said that Russian journalism was going through a dark valley with over a hundred journalists, media outlets, human rights defenders and non-governmental organisations that have been branded foreign agents in Russia. This means enemies of the people, and he dedicates his prize to the entire community of investigative journalists and his colleagues at Novaya Gazeta who lost their lives.
They include Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow 15 years ago after angering the Kremlin with dispatches from the war in Chechnya.
Ressa was the co-laureate of Muratov's co-laureate and called for the reform of social media platforms.
Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that is circulating through our information ecosystem, prioritised by American internet companies that make more money by spreading hate and triggering the worst in us. For the US, change or revoke section 230, the law that treats social media platforms like utilities. Ressa and Muratov are the first journalists to receive the Nobel Prize since Germany's Carl von Ossietzky won the Nobel Prize for revealing his country's secret rearmament programme in 1935.
In his speech, Ressa noted that Von Ossietzky was never able to collect his award, as he died in a Nazi concentration camp.
She said that the Nobel committee was signalling a similar historical moment, another existential point for democracy by giving this to journalists today.
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