During the Wroclaw Global Forum, the most stirring moment of the Freedom Awards ceremony was the appearance of representatives of the People of Maidan – singer Ruslana and Kateryna Kruk – on stage. The first one was one of the faces of the protest, whereas the other one informed the world about the situation in Maidan via social media.
Vladimir Kliczko, the leader of the Udar party, did not arrive in Wroclaw, because June has been an extremely hot period in Ukrainian politics. Radosław Sikorski, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in his eulogy: ‘You really have to be tough to stand in the cold for many weeks with the awareness of the fact that Maidan is surrounded by snipers who are ready to shoot at the protesting people.
The young Ukrainian women were received enthusiastically. ‘I’m 23 years old, just like my beloved Ukraine. I know that the life of an individual and the existence of the country makes sense only when we fight for freedom,’ said Kateryna Kruk.
This year’s Atlantic Council Freedom Awards gala will certainly be full of emotion, too. The Freedom Award Committee granted a posthumous award to a Russian oppositionist Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov – a politician and a defender of human rights – was shot dead in a Moscow street in February this year. The murder with a political context took place on the day preceding the publication of a report on the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine. The award will be collected by Zhanna Nemtsova, Boris’s daughter. On Tuesday the 9th of June, the Moscow Echo radio reported that Zhanna had left Russia in fear of her own life.
The Freedom Award Competition recognised also Agnieszka Holland – a Polish film director and screenplay writer, who was nominated three times for the Academy Award (for her films ‘Angry Harvest’, ‘Europa, Europa’, ‘In Darkness’). This year’s Freedom Awards will also be received by Carl Bild – a Swedish politician and a former Prime Minister of Sweden. In the 1990s, he was a mediator between participants in the Balkan conflict and a co-organiser of the peace conference in Dayton, where the treaty putting an end to the war in Bosnia was signed.
The Wroclaw Global Forum project is co-financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
