Novaya Gazeta, fiercely independent Russian news outlet, says it will shut down

The newspaper survived three decades, six murders, death threats, an acid attack on its co-founder, raids and interrogations by the security services, wartime censorship and the seizure of its printing press. Its journalists fought on, finding loopholes in Russia’s increasingly oppressive laws.

But on Friday morning, journalists at Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s leading independent news outlet, reported news that they had done all they could to prevent: “They killed us,” they said in a statement.

Novaya Gazeta, whose co-founder Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending press freedom in Russia, will shut down on Nov. 9 after publishing one last edition, the journalists said. Muratov said in an interview on Friday that the government was responsible.

“First they jailed an employee, then declared the newspaper a foreign agent, and then designated another 100 people as individuals affiliated with a foreign agent,” said Muratov, 65, referring to the Russian authorities. “Then they raided the editor-in-chief’s home, and we still kept working.”

Related

More

The outlet is losing its lease after 29 years on Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow, the journalists said in their statement. (The space also houses a small museum honoring Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta journalist who was murdered on President Vladimir Putin’s birthday in 2006.)

In addition, Muratov said, the banks that helped Novaya Gazeta collect payments from readers — “our sole source of income” — have abruptly stopped doing so. They said their rules had changed, but Muratov blamed the FSB, the successor agency of the KGB, which has taken on a wider role since the Ukraine war began.

“This isn’t just our personal story,” the journalists said in their statement. “It’s the story of a country and a society that are being finished off in exactly the same way.”