MOSCOW -- The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI) says a planned meeting of its lecturers and students with Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov has been postponed amid online protests against the meeting by supporters of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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Muratov, the editor in chief of the independent newspaper Novaya gazeta and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, has openly called for Moscow to stop its war against Ukraine.
MFTI Rector Dmitry Livanov said in a March 23 statement that the forum with Muratov -- titled Conflict Of Generations After February 24 -- was postponed as "it was impossible to avoid politicizing the talk."
The discussion was scheduled for March 28. February 24 refers to the day the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
"Despite huge interest among [MFTI staff and students] for the talk with Dmitry [Muratov], just the announcement of the event caused a storm of negative emotions, mostly from people who have nothing to do with MFTI," Livanov's statement said. "I would like to emphasize that Dmitry Muratov was not added to the Russian Justice Ministry’s registry of foreign agents and there are no legal obstacles either for his talking with students, nor his teaching activities."
Livanov's statement came two days after several Telegram channels supporting Russias war in Ukraine called to cancel the meeting with Muratov, accusing him of having a pro-Ukrainian stance.
Muratov said in an interview with the Novaya gazeta Europe Telegram channel that when he was invited to the meeting at the MFTI in January he anticipated such a reaction from what he called "ultras."
"I surely understand the reason why the university informed me and the students about the postponement of the meeting," Muratov said.
Last month, the Moscow City Court upheld a lower court decision to withdraw the licenses of Muratov's Novaya gazeta newspaper and its Novaya rasskaz-gazeta magazine, two of the last independent media outlets in the country, amid a crackdown on the free press during the Kremlin's war against Ukraine.