Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize Winner Tells UK To Put Russia On "High Risk" List

A Ukrainian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has issued a call for the UK to put Russia on its list of “high risk” jurisdictions to make it harder for the country to get around sanctions.

Human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk told PoliticsHome that she does not know “why it has not been done yet”, and said that putting Russia on such a list would “oblige companies and banks and state authorities to be more careful” with their operations.

Matviichuk was speaking on a visit to London, shortly after the two year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She said that Ukraine is “very grateful for the support of people in the United Kingdom” during the country’s “dramatic time of our history”.  “We will never forget the support and it has helped us to survive,” she added. 

Matviichuk heads up the Ukrainian human rights organisation the Centre for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. According to the prize organisation, the winners that year “have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens”. 

She said that an “important problem” is the idea that “Russia still finds a way to bypass sanctions”, such as importing technologies that are then used in the war, and believed that this would be an important way the UK could further crack down on Russia.

“What the United Kingdom can do is put Russia on the United Kingdom’s High Risk jurisdiction list, I really don’t know why it has not been done yet," she continued. 

“Russia tries to find different creative schemes to bypass sanctions and that is why we have to narrow all possibilities, and this is one of the important legal tools to do it and it can be done very easily, it’s just political.”

The UK