MOSCOW: The Russian Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Dmitry Muratov who earlier announced to auction off his prize to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees has sold his prize for $103.5 million, breaking the record for a Nobel Prize auction.
“I was hoping that there was going to be an enormous amount of solidarity,” Muratov said after the sale. “But I was not expecting this to be such a huge amount.”
In the past, the most ever paid for a Nobel Prize medal was in 2014, when James Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA earned him a Nobel prize in 1962, sold his medal for $4.76m.
Muratov who was awarded the gold medal in October 2021, had helped found an independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was Muratov’s idea to auction off his prize, having already announced he was donating the accompanying $500,000 cash award to charity. The idea of the donation, he said, “is to give the children refugees a chance for a future”
Muratov has pledged the proceeds will go directly to UNICEF in its efforts to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine. Melted down, the 175 grams of 23-karat gold contained in Muratov’s medal would be worth about $10,000.
Asked why he chose UNICEF as the recipient of the funds, Muratov said: “It’s critical to us that that organization does not belong to any government. It can work above the government. There are no borders for it.”
Muratov has been highly critical of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war launched in February that has caused nearly 5 million Ukrainians to flee to other countries for safety, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War.
