Oleksandra Matviichuk Quotes

"Time to take responsibility: Speech by Oleksandra Matviychuk at Nobel Peace Prize awarding ceremony", UkrInform, 10 December 2022

There are people who will fight for you, who will fight for your rights, who will never leave you alone. And this understanding provides a coverage to continue the fight. And let my lessons learn from this story is that in many part of the world, human rights defenders, they’re not working in human rights field. They’re fighting for human rights. And sometimes because of the size of challenges this fight, it seems that they have no sense. But we have to continue our fight honestly, and result will unexpectedly be achieved.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to all people in Ukraine who are currently fighting for freedom in all its senses. For the freedom to be a free and independent state. For the freedom to develop the Ukrainian language and culture. For the freedom to have one’s own democratic choice and to build a country in which the rights of every person are protected, the government is accountable, the courts are independent, and the police do not beat peaceful student demonstrations.

Like sometimes I feel myself that we are documenting pain, which burned us out, but parallel, I see and feel the huge wave of solidarity among the people in Ukraine and abroad. And ordinary people start to do unordinary things. And this energy can change a lot.

This story is about resistance to common evil, about the fact that freedom has no borders, and the values ​​of human rights are universal. That human rights defenders build invisible horizontal connections in their societies to assert freedom and protect people in our part of the world, in which a monster is once again trying to rule. And who will lose sooner or later. And then peace will come. In no way should this award sound like an old narrative about fraternal nations. This story is about something else. This story is about the motto that I heard from my teacher, dissident and philosopher Yevhen Sverstyuk – “For our freedom and yours”

We call on the international community to become their voice and join us in seeking their release. As well as the release of all political prisoners who fought against the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Belarus.

The problem of the Russian nation is that Russians have this imperialistic code, as a driver of their existence. I wish Russians could overcome this side of their nature. It’s a necessity, if Russians are to be happy and successful.

My first language was Russian. I switched to the Ukrainian language in school when I started to learn Ukrainian history and Ukrainian literature. I suddenly understood that my parents spoke Russian not because it was their choice but because they had been forced into it.

I hope that we will be able to overcome the rage, because sooner or later the war will finish, and we will have to continue building a civilized world. Maybe, in such a crisis, you go beyond some borders like nationality or region, because we are humans. We see ourselves now like people who are fighting for freedom, for human values. For us it doesn’t matter if you are Ukrainians or not. We closely cooperate with Russian human-rights defenders, with Belarusian human-rights defenders. We understand their willingness to help is because we are all human.

We live in very dramatic times, and political leaders of the world have to take historical responsibility because for decades, I’ve seen that political leaders behave like they believe the problems we face will vanish. But the truth is that these problems will not vanish. They have to take responsibility and to solve these problems for the next generation and not think only about the electoral period or the future of their own parties.