'They killed us': Russia's last independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta will shut on November 9 after Kremlin pressure
Novaya Gazeta's masthead, whose editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov said Russian security services had forced the team to close, with journalist Oleg Roldugin arrested in April and remaining under house arrest.
Novaya Gazeta, founded in 1993 with money from Mikhail Gorbachev's Nobel Peace Prize, will publish its final edition and switch off its servers on November 9. The Kremlin evicted staff from their Moscow newsroom on Potapovsky Lane and simultaneously disabled the donation system that was the paper's last source of funding, leaving it no way to survive. Co-founder Dmitry Muratov, himself a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said authorities had systematically dismantled the paper step by step.
Six Novaya Gazeta journalists were murdered over the years, including Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in 2006 — her killer was pardoned in 2023 after joining the Ukraine war effort.
Editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov said staff will be left 'on the street, with no means of subsistence and under the constant threat of repression.'
The Anna Politkovskaya Museum, housed in her former office inside the newsroom, will also close on November 9.
