Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta closes citing gov’t clampdown

Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta has ended operations due to pressure from authorities.

The newspaper reported that it held its last editorial meeting on Monday and closed its newsroom. It announced last month that it was being forced to shut down after being classed as a “foreign agent” by Moscow, a label used to stifle dissent.

The Russian media has come under increased scrutiny from the state amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine. In October, authorities searched the home of Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, and took him in for questioning. Another editor at the paper, Oleg Roldugin, was arrested in April.

Cofounder Dmitry Muratov addressed journalists who gathered to witness the closure of the Novaya Gazeta office in Moscow.

“Those in our country who advocate for peace have been denied the right to read what they choose, as we see happening today,” he said, adding that constitutional guarantees for political and civil rights had “effectively ceased to function”.

Novaya Gazeta was one of the few remaining outlets that openly criticised Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Kremlin’s policies, amid a widening crackdown on the media and free speech.

In September, the outlet was designated a “foreign agent”. Novaya Gazeta said that since then banks had stopped processing the reader donations on which it relied for financial survival.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk said in October that Novaya Gazeta’s closure was “yet another devastating blow for remaining independent media” in Russia.

The Kremlin played down the closure, saying it was part of “a normal cycle of change”.

The paper was co-founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and funded with money from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. It continued reporting despite censorship tightening in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Several of its reporters have been murdered in killings widely seen as retribution for their work, among them Anna Politkovskaya, who spent years investigating abuses by Russia’s military in Chechnya and criticised President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

She was found dead in her apartment block in 2006.