The Nobel Peace Prize as a publicity stunt

Every year the Nobel Peace Prize rewards genuine efforts to build much-needed peace across the world. Sadly, it also serves as an opportunity for self-promotion by people who have no real chance of winning. And this year is no different. Deadlines for nomination closed in January with 196 individuals and 89 organisations having been nominated. That may seem a large number but it is actually 18.5 percent less than last year, EU Reporter says in an article titled "The Nobel Peace Prize as a publicity stunt" as published by Caliber.Az.

Press reports have revealed over 50 names already, including such highly divisive figures as former U.S. President Donald Trump, Wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange and Space-X founder Elon Musk. None of these are seen as real contenders and are largely being promoted by their own supporters.

But the most inexplicable is the nomination of Ruben Vardanyan. Ruben who?, you might ask. Ruben Vardanyan is a Russian oligarch turned Armenian politician whose office claims has been nominated by several political and public figures, including a Nobel Peace Prize laureate apparently.

How exactly does Vardanyan deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the Peace Prize was to be awarded to the person “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes many different kinds of peace work and concepts of peace. However, none of Vardanyan’s activities seem to fit the bill.

He is a former chief executive officer and shareholder of the Troika Dialog Russian investment bank (bought by Sberbank in 2011) and according to Forbes in 2021 has assets of over $1 billion.

In September 2022, Vardanyan renounced his Russian citizenship and moved to the region of Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but was, at the time, still under Armenian occupation since the 1990s.The idea was to provide political and financial support to the illegal separatist regime that had been created and kept alive by Armenia since the early 90s in Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory, thus undermining the ongoing peace process between Baku and Yerevan.

Within two months, by November 4, 2022, Vardanyan had, somewhat incredibly, risen to what the local Armenian authority (‘Artsakh’) in Karabakh called ‘Minister of State’. ‘Artsakh’ was the name of the self-proclaimed local authority but was never recognized by any country in the world, not even by Armenia.

So Vardanyan was effectively running this shadow government of rump Karabakh (or ‘Artsakh’ as Armenians called it), after Azerbaijan had reclaimed much of its territory in the Second Karabakh War of 2020.

Vardanyan even provocatively told Azerbaijani officials that Karabakh was “his zone.” 

His time as ‘Minister of State’ was reportedly spent encouraging an increasingly strident anti-Azerbaijan posture from vocal Armenians in Karabakh. His critics said he might even be a pro-Moscow stooge sent to stir up discord and that his time in Karabakh helped undermine already fraught attempts to organize a peaceful settlement of coexistence in Karabakh. Hardly what you’d expect from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate wannabe.

Vardanyan stands accused of laundering money through his network of offshore companies and transferring funds to Putin’s associates, earning him the nickname “Putin’s wallet”.He also supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which – given the assistance provided by his companies to the Russian war effort – landed him on the sanctions list by the Ukrainian government. The Biden administration too considered placing Vardayan under sanctions in 2022. But that year, he renounced his Russian citizenship – a move widely seen as a measure to avoid Western sanctions – and relocated as an Armenian citizen to occupied Karabakh.

Accordingly, Azerbaijan labelled Vardanyan as an agent of Moscow, seeing him as a man who demanded independence for Karabakh with his eyes on its rich mineral assets. During a panel at the Munich Security Conference in early 2023, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev noted that his country would not talk with Vardanyan, who he said had been ‘exported’ from Russia.

Azerbaijan launched a lightning military action in September 2023 and recovered all its remaining territory of Karabakh, including the capital Khankendi.

Vardanyan himself was arrested on September 27, 2023 by Azerbaijani border guards and is awaiting trial for the “financing of terrorism” among other crimes.

As with many recent candidates for a Nobel Peace Prize, the nomination of Ruben Vardanyan should be seen as a PR exercise.

By nominating Vardanyan for the Nobel, however fantastical that may seem, his supporters are hoping to persuade the world’s media to highlight his detention. Painting Vardanyan as a peace-loving prisoner may seem at odds with his own actions when in office.

In fact, it is ironic that with Vardanyan and his fellow ‘Artsakh’ officials no longer in power in Karabakh, Armenia and Azerbaijan are getting closer to peace than ever before.

Yerevan and Baku have agreed to transfer control of four border villages back to Azerbaijan and erect the first border markers between the two countries as part of the process of delimitation and demarcation of what would one day become an Armenian-Azerbaijani state border. And in December2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan struck a deal of mutual diplomatic support that eventually supported Azerbaijan’s bidto host this year’s COP29 in Baku.

Hijacking the Nobel Peace Prize nomination process to further one’s media campaign should be called out for what it is: a publicity stunt. The fact that Vardanyan’s own office announced his nomination to the media should have served as a warning.

The Nobel Committee could consider enacting a higher bar for nominations in the future to deter others from misusingthis internationally-recognized accolade for their own agendaand thereby discrediting it.