Russian rights group Memorial is honored to be jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but it should have gone to political prisoners like Alexei Navalny who are risking their lives for fighting President Vladimir Putin, the group’s co-founder said on Friday.

Lev Ponomarev, who helped create Memorial in the late 1980s as part of the Soviet reform movement Perestroika, said his group was “destroyed” when Russia stepped up its invasion of Ukraine, but still tried to continue his work .

“We were only 10 people and we thought everything would start with perestroika. It didn’t work that way,” Ponomarev said in an interview with Agence France-Presse in Paris, where he now has political asylum.

“It’s very well deserved and of course I’m happy thinking about what I was thinking 30 years ago,” he said.

But Ponomarev said an even better move by the Norwegian Peace Prize Committee would have been to award the prize to Navalny, Putin’s leading opposition critic and an outspoken anti-corruption figure, or to liberal opposition figures Vladimir Kara-Murza or Ilya Yashin, who are also jailed.

“Those behind bars must be rewarded every year,” Ponomarev said on the sidelines of a forum organized by exile group Russie-Libertes (Russia-Freedom) and Paris City Hall.

“I have to say now that giving the Nobel Prize – if they want to support Russia when it is under its harshest regime – would have been the right choice for political figures,” he said.

“I mean Navalny, I mean Vladimir Kara-Murza, I mean Ilya Yashin. People who consciously choose this position because they know they are risking their lives and not stepping aside and saying the words that need to be said.”

Kara-Murza, who was jailed in April for denouncing the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive, was charged with high treason, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Yashin was also detained in July after denouncing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

In addition to Memorial, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine, which documents alleged Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and to imprisoned activist Ales Bialiatski of Belarus.

Russian authorities ordered Memorial’s closure last year, a move Putin failed to stop, and pressure on lawyers has increased during the invasion of Ukraine.

Ponomarev, a former physicist, has been at the center of the Russian right-wing scene since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Paris, he continues to push for the release of political prisoners in Russia and remains in close contact with his Memorial colleagues who remain in Russia.

He doubted that the award would prompt Putin to change his stance on Memorial at this point, although there was an opportunity to raise the organization’s status in eventual negotiations with the West.

“Putin is a total and utter global evil and it will not make him identify with Memorial better at all. But if he trades with the West, it could possibly be the problem of some kind of trade,” Ponomarev said.

“The organization is destroyed, but there are people who want to preserve the archives and the work. Most of Memorial’s employees have moved abroad,” he said.

Ponomarev, 81, was granted political refugee status in France after fleeing threats of detention in Russia but said he hopes his exile will not prove permanent.

“I think I can go back and I work a lot on it every day, with this activism. I left because there were threats against me, a criminal case, I could have been imprisoned,” he said.