Nobel ceremony returns to full glamour since COVID; Peace Prize winners blast Putin

Dec. 10 (UPI) -- The ceremony to award new Nobel laureates in Stockholm returned to its pre-pandemic glamour on Saturday as Peace Prize winners blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine during a separate award ceremony in Oslo.

The famed awards ceremony in Sweden has given out annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic sciences since its foundation in 1901 but was scaled back for two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of the laureates from 2020 and 2021 also attended the festivities in the Swedish capital on Saturday, which included appearances from Sweden's royal family and government officials from across the world with music by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.

The banquet featured several courses of luxurious dishes including a starter of seaweed baked pike-perch and stuffed tomato, parsley emulsion, kohlrabi and bread spices with dill seed pearls and flower crisp constructed by chef Jimmi Eriksson while a plum dessert was created by Annie Hesselstrand.

The award for advancements in chemistry went to Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless while the award for medicine went to Svante Pääbo and the award for literature went to Annie Ernaux.

"Chemists are dreamers. We think up new molecules and bring them to life," Bertozzi said during a speech at the event on Saturday.

In his speech, French physicist Alain Aspect said that: "The conclusion is now clear: Einstein's view on physical reality cannot be upheld. Entanglement is confirmed in its strangest aspects."

The Nobel Economics Prize went to Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of U.S. Federal Reserve, and economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for research on how supporting failing banks can prevent an economic crisis from worsening.

During the Nobel Peace Prize awards in Norway, laureates from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine denounced Putin for the war in Ukraine in front of guests including Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja.

Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties criticized calls for Ukraine to allow Russia to keep some of the territory it illegally annexed earlier this year.

"Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms," Matviichuk said. "This would not be peace, but occupation."

She also said that Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus who helped Putin invade Ukraine, should face an international tribunal.

Ales Bialiatski, the head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna who won the 2022 award with Matviichuk and the Russian human rights group Memorial, was unable to attend the event.

Bialiatski has been jailed by the Belarus government since 2020 after large-scale protests emerged in the country challenging the re-election of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko. His wife Natallia Pinchuk spoke on his behalf at the ceremony Saturday.

"In my homeland, the entirety of Belarus is in a prison," Bialiatski said in the remarks made by Pinchuk.

"This award belongs to all my human rights defender friends, all civic activists, tens of thousands of Belarusians who have gone through beatings, torture, arrests, prison."

Bialiatski criticized the human rights situation in Belarus, where he said "the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded."

Last December, the U.S. issued a joint statement with several ally nations rebuking a Russian court's decision to "forcibly close" the human rights group International Memorial in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine. Memorial is the third recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.