Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last big independent paper, shuts its doors
Novaya Gazeta closed its Moscow offices on Monday after thirty-three years, the last major independent outlet critical of the Kremlin still operating inside Russia. Its staff said the authorities had “forced our editorial team to cease operations” through fines, a foreign-agent label, blocked platforms, a seized printing house, revoked registration, frozen donations and finally eviction. “Human rights and freedoms have been abolished in this country, and defending them is now treated as a crime,” the paper said.
Founded in 1993, the paper lost six journalists to murder, among them Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, and its editor Dmitry Muratov shared the Nobel peace prize in 2021 before being doused with paint in 2022 and stepping down in 2023 when he too was branded a foreign agent. Staff left a sign on the door reading “Here lived Novaya Gazeta”; the reporter Tatiana Britskaya said “this is our home, and we’re losing it”, and the editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, promised: “Novaya Gazeta will return, to our readers and to our colleagues.” The Kremlin’s Dmitry Peskov called Russian media “highly diverse” and the closure part of “a standard rotational process”. Independent Russian journalism now publishes from exile. For the Abu Dhabi negotiators who speak of “military transparency” and reviving the Nato–Russia Council, it is a reminder of the domestic order any settlement would entrench. Watch whether the exile edition keeps the name.