Nobel Peace Prize to be announced soon, as war rages nearby

Critics of the Russian regime and its allies are among those whom many expect to clinch the award.

Alexey Navalny, the Kremlin critic and opposition leader who was sentenced to jail on fraud charges by a Moscow court this year, features atop many experts’ predictions.

Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent domestic critic, and his dissenting views have almost cost him his life. He was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, an attack several Western officials and Navalny himself openly blamed on the Kremlin. Russia has denied any involvement.

After a five-month stay in Germany recovering from the Novichok poisoning, Navalny last year returned to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested for violating probation terms imposed from a 2014 case.

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is also generally seen as a strong contender. The dissident was forced into exile in Lithuania after running against strongman leader and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko in an August 2020 election denounced by the international community as neither free nor fair.

A joint win for Tsikhanouskaya and Navalny is predicted by Henrik Urdal, the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, who draws up a shortlist of frontrunners for the prize annually.

“Both Tsikhanouskaya and Navalny are vocal critics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Urdal wrote this year. “A shared Nobel Peace Prize between them would be seen as a clear protest of the Russian aggression and the assistance by Belarus, and as support of democratic and non-violent alternatives to Lukashenko and Putin.”

No peace prize was awarded throughout most of World Wars I and II, and on a handful of other occasions. But the prize has frequently been used to highlight other ongoing conflicts, or to provide a beacon of hope when the world encountered grim times.

That question will have been key to decision-makers in Oslo, Norway, who were tasked with picking a symbol of peacemaking even as a bordering country wages war on the continent.

The conflict “would weigh enormously on their minds,” Smith said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sits atop many bookmakers’ list of favorites to win the prize, and some companies also list as frontrunners the general population of Ukraine and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has aided people displaced by the war.

But bookmakers’ odds are rarely a reliable guide to the victor, experts say, because they tend to overstate the relevance of topical events.

And an award that directly wades into the Ukraine conflict is considered unlikely.

“Zelensky is a war leader, and what is happening at the moment is war. You can admire or not admire the action he’s undertaking, but it’s about war and the armed defense of his country,” Smith said. “That’s a fact that should be respected in and of itself.

“Hopefully, the war will come to an end and they will make peace,” he added. “If Zelensky or somebody else can contribute to making that peace, then there will be time to acknowledge that enormous achievement.”

The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded in Norway on Friday – as Europe’s biggest war for seven decades rages on the continent.

Russia’s ongoing conflict in Ukraine means this year’s announcement will rank among the most closely watched – and complicated – decisions made by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in recent times.

The award of the peace prize – one of humanity’s most coveted accolades – often serves as an offer of hope in uncertain times. But experts in the fields of peace and security warn that the bleak geopolitical picture may muddle 2022’s award.

“Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out who might get the prize because there are so many possible candidates,” said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

“This year, it’s hard to figure out who might get the prize because there’s so little good that is happening in the world of peace and security,” Smith told CNN.

The Nobels are notoriously difficult to predict, and the thought process behind each selection is shrouded in secrecy. But experts have highlighted a short list of frontrunners – while reserving the right to be surprised by a left-field decision.