welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur, and today i'm in oslo for the presentation of this year's nobel peace prize. there are threejoint winners, two of them human rights organisations, one from ukraine, one from russia, the third an imprisoned political dissident from belarus. now, obviously, he cannot be here, but i am joined by leaders of the two human rights groups from kyiv and from moscow.

in the past, when i've interviewed joint winners, it has been together, but not this year. the ukrainians insisted on separate interviews, one telling indication of the sensitivities surrounding this year's nobel peace prize. oleksandra matviichuk, welcome to hardtalk, and many congratulations on winning the nobel peace prize with your organisation, the center for civil liberties. thank you. i have to ask you, now that you are away from kyiv, from your home, you're here in oslo to receive the prize, how strange does it feel? it's a huge contrast.

now we know that everything which we call normal life and take for granted is very fragile. the most positive is that there are a lot of things which became secondary, and there are only several things, you have a sharp feeling that they are important in our life. i imagine there are also bittersweet feelings about this ceremony, which you are now part of because you are a joint winner. one of the otherjoint winners, and his photograph is next to you, is ales bialiatski from belarus. he is in prison. yes. i know you know him quite well. what are your feelings? you are able to be here and he is not. it's, like, nobel peace prize during the war, and all of us paying a high price for fighting for freedom, for democracy and for human rights. and this is a second imprisonment of ales bialiatski.

he is an extremely brave person, so he will continue this battle, even in prison. you know that inside your own country, in ukraine, there are people, significant voices who feel that this prize... ..is unacceptable, that taking a prize alongside a russian, albeit a russian human rights campaigner, sends the wrong message, some sort of message of equivalency between the two sides in this conflict. what do you say to your own people who have that view? first of all, i want to explain the western audience why some part of ukrainians are annoyed at it, because it can be similar and look like to the old soviet narrative about sisters nations which were circulated during soviet union. and it was a huge lie because they weren't sisters nation. only one nation dominate, only one culture dominate, only one language prevail. but this nobel peace prize

is not about countries. this nobel peace prize is a very human stories, because it's about people. it's about human rights defenders who jointly resist with common evil who want again to dominate in our region, and in this regard, it's like, remind me the motto of soviet dissidents, "foryours and for ours freedom." when i have interviewed nobel peace prize winners in the past who've jointly received the award, they've been together and we've talked as a group. you wanted to do this alone, separate, not with yan rachinsky, who's won the award on behalf of russian memorial human rights group. why? as i mentioned before, memorial is our partner and we work for years and they help us a lot. and i have a huge respect

to all my russian human rights colleagues who do their work in very difficult circumstances. now, in the.. now we are in a war and we want to make the voices of ukrainian human rights defender tangible, as well as russian human rights defenders tangible. so i'm sure that regardless that we are doing separate interviews, we... we transmit and deliver the same messages. but symbolically, some might feel your message is that there can be no dialogue right now with russians, any russians, even human rights activist russians. is that your message or not? no, it's not my message, because in practice, we are not even in dialogue with russian human rights defenders. we're in constantly daily work, especially during the war, when we are finding ourselves in the circumstances that we defend people when the law doesn't work. tell me about the evolution of your center for civil

liberties, because it seems to me when it was set up, the primary focus was on internal issues inside ukraine, a focus on rule of law, independentjudiciary, rooting out the endemic corruption inside your country. but right now, your focus seems to be absolutely on the cataloguing, the holding to account of russia for suspected war crimes on ukrainian territory. has there been a fundamental shift of focus? the center for civil liberties 15 years�* fight for human rights and human dignity, and when circumstances changed, we worked very flexibly to be effective in the new world which emerged. so when russia started this war in 2014, we was the first human rights organisation who sent mobile groups to crimea,

to luhansk and donetsk regions to document war crimes. and we have done it for eight years. i have personally interviewed more than 100 people who survived captivity, and they told me horrible stories, how they were beaten, how they were raped, how their fingers were cut, how their nails were torn away, how their nails were drilled, how they were tortured with electricity. and the horror of the situation is that after a large—scale invasion, this practice is multiplied to another region where russians are present for current moment. how do you, as one organisation which struggles for resources, how do you begin to cope with your... ..determined search for accountability and justice? how do you do it? we united our efforts with several dozens of human rights organisations, mostly regional ones, and we created a ukrainian network of local documentators.

we have an ambitious goal to document in chronological order each criminal episode which was committed in the smallest village in each oblast in ukraine, and working together only for the nine months of this large—scale invasion, we jointly documented 27,000 episodes of war crimes. and i ask myself, for whom do we document all this information for? because now we face with a very visible accountability gap when the national legal system is overloaded with an extreme amount of crimes, and international criminal court will limit investigation only to several select cases. so the question is who will provide justice for hundreds of thousands

of victims of the war crimes? and this is the issue in which center for civil liberties is working for current moment. yeah, you have said very publicly that you want to see accountability go to the very top. i put it to you that none of the mechanisms that the international community has, led by the international criminal court, the icc at the hague, none of them, frankly, are capable of bringing vladimir putin to any kind of courtroom. history convincingly proves that authoritarian regimes collapse, and their leaders who think that they are untouchable appeared under the court. and i believe that law is a very dynamic material. we live in a new century and we can fill this accountability gap with a new additional international mechanism. and we must change the approach to work around justice, to provide justice for all victims, not only for those who will be lucky to be selected by international criminal court.

let me ask you a very basic question. here we are celebrating your winning, jointly winning the nobel peace prize. but right now, you are not a woman with a message of peace. it seems you believe that the war has to continue, that ukraine must be victorious, and you are asking the international community to send more weapons to ukraine. so yours is not right now a message focused on peace. it is a message actually focused on war. is that fair? we have to change our paradigm of thinking, because there will not be sustainable peace in our region withoutjustice, because russian troops for decades committed war crimes in different countries and they have never been punished for this. and this led to a situation that russia started to believe they can do whatever they wanted. so we must break the circle

of impunity in order to stop the situation when russia use war as a tool, how to achieve geopolitical interests, and use war crimes and the methods how to win this war. do you see this war as fundamentally a putin problem or a russia problem? because they're somewhat different. unfortunately, majority of russians supported this war, and putin governs his country not only with repressions and censorship, but like with a special contract, a social contract which is based on so—called russian glory. and that's why a success of ukraine is... ..will provide a huge impact to the democratic future of russia itself, because then russian people will rethink their imperialistic ambitions and will open a path to democracy. final question, there

will eventually be an end to this war. goodness knows when it will come. but are you confident that the ukraine that emerges from this war will match your ambition to see a genuinely free, democratic ukraine, which does meet the standards of europe when it comes to rule of law, independentjudiciary, a government free of corruption? i'm not a person who predict future. i belong to a person who create the future what we are going to see, and i work and the whole center for civil liberties are working in order to live in a country where the work of our organisation will be not needed any more. previously, when there have been joint winners of the peace prize, i've spoken to them together, but not this time. the ukrainians insisted on separate interviews, so then i spoke to yan rachinsky, chair of the russian

human rights group memorial. i want to ask you how you feel about being here in oslo receiving the award on behalf of memorial, your organisation, but also, i imagine, painfully aware that one of the other recipients of the award, ales bialiatski, whose picture is beside you, he's not here, he's in prison, he cannot be here.

i know there are connections and networks of human rights activists across your region, and i know, too, that you personally are familiar with the work of the winner of the award from ukraine, oleksandra matviichuk. but you also know that there are powerful voices in ukraine who say this award of the peace prize jointly to a russian and a ukrainian is wrong, it is symbolically wrong. and they seem to wish that the ukrainians had not accepted the prize. what is your message to those people?

memorial�*s mission, which has been established for many years now, is primarily about accounting and truth—telling for the past, for the crimes committed, particularly during the years of stalin's terror in the soviet union. would it be fair to say

that your focus is primarily on accountability in history rather than accountability in russia today?

is there an irony here? your presence in oslo receiving the nobel peace prize at a time when putin has effectively liquidated your organisation, your offices have been closed, your finances have been frozen. is it actually, right now in 2022, possible for you in memorial to do your work?

the fact is, in russia, you are now labelled as a foreign agent. indeed, we know, because some of your colleagues in the past have been killed, and many other human rights workers in russia have faced intimidation and the threat of death. we know that your own personal safety cannot be guaranteed. so how can you continue your work?

do you think that, in many ways, memorial has failed? because your core message has always been that the russian

people need to learn the lessons, the very bleak lessons of the soviet past. but in many ways, given what is happening inside russia today and what russia is doing in ukraine, it seems those lessons have not been learned. but it means 80% of the people either acquiesce or actively support putin's current policies, including the invasion and occupation of ukraine.

when you talk to me about the absolute control that the putin government currently exercises over russia and its people, i'm thinking maybe things

haven't changed so very much from the age of stalin and that extreme authoritarianism. so i'm just wondering whether you feel there is any hope right now for a different sort of russia, a russia that recognises the need for a strong civil society, independentjudiciary, the rule of law, all the things that memorial wants to see. do you have any faith at all that they can be achieved in your lifetime?

yan rachinsky, i thank you very much for joining me on hardtalk. thank you. spasibo vam.

hello. it's been a wintry weekend with many places struggling to get above freezing during the days, and we've seen some heavy snowfall for several areas. this is picture taken in gillingham in kent before the sun went down on sunday. so, there's been plenty of heavy snowfall, around 10cm in places. now, over the next few days, things are staying cold and we've got wintry hazards such as snow showers, ice stretches and freezing fog. overnight, this snowfall is pushing across the likes of east london, essex, up towards norfolk, even as far as lincolnshire. so, 2—10cm of lying snow overnight and freezing fog that's going to be really quite dense for some areas too. further north under those clear skies, we start monday morning with temperatures as low as about —15 celsius around the sheltered glens of scotland. so, a bitterly cold start. do watch out for lying snow and icy stretches. southern half of the uk in general stays quite cloudy. it could be a few snow flurries coming out of this cloud, probably best of the sunshine in wales and southwest england. further north, we've got

clearer skies and most places looking dry but after that very cold start, temperatures will struggle to get above freezing in places. through monday evening then, still a few snow flurries working across parts of the midlands, perhaps northwest england. more snow also heading in for northern and northeastern scotland. so, perhaps not quite as cold compared to sunday night as we move through monday night into tuesday morning. but still, subzero really wherever you are and hard frost once again. so, for tuesday then, more snow showers across northern and eastern scotland, one or two working into the northeast of england with that cold northerly breeze. fairly cloudy skies working in from the south and again, some freezing fog that's going to be slow to clear. so, temperatures once again between around about freezing and perhaps three degrees for most of us. the blue colours, the cold air mass still with us and we can trace these wind arrows all the way back to the arctic through the middle of the week. so, a bit of a change in wind direction, more of a cold northerly wind. that will bring still some wintry showers in the north and east but improved visibility from midweek onwards. so we will be losing all the mist and freezing fog

we have seen recently. plenty of more heavy snow showers across northern and eastern scotland and with the sting on tuesday to thursday, it could be between five to 20cm of snow. largely dry elsewhere, temperatures again struggling to get much above freezing. stays cold for the working week but a little bit milder through the weekend by the time we get to sunday, bye—bye.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm mariko oi. the headlines: a libyan, suspected of making the bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over the scottish town of lockerbie in 1988, is confirmed to be in us custody. four children are in a critical condition after being pulled from a lake in freezing temperatures in central england. fiji heads to the polls this week, following an election campaign marred by allegations of corruption and threats against journalists. splashdown, from the tranquil waters of the pacific, the