'Novaya Gazeta', the last opposition newspaper of Russia, closes due to the pressure from the Kremlin: "They have killed us"

Moscow“They have killed us.” That is how the statement from Novaya Gazeta, the last opposition newspaper still operating inside Russia, begins, announcing the end of its activity due to persecution by the authorities. In the last few hours, the workers have been evicted from their headquarters in the center of Moscow and all their sources of funding have been cut off. This is why the editorial team has explained that they have no choice but to close down permanently on November 9, after thirty-three years in operation.

“It is a coordinated operation. They will not convince anyone with the banks' excuses, which claim they are acting in accordance with their internal corporate rules. They are external rules, imposed by the State’s repressive apparatus, by FSB agents infiltrated in all organizations. They consider the country to be their property,” the journalists state.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the newspaper had been under enormous pressure and was operating with great difficulty. In 2022, the State closed their printing press and forced them to give up their print edition. The judiciary revoked their registration as a media outlet, declared their workers foreign agents, and many of them went into exile. A few months ago, the police further increased the stranglehold on the publication by arresting the chief editor, Oleg Rolduguin, accused of illicitly obtaining data on Russian citizens, and searched the newspaper's headquarters for hours.

The employees of Novaya Gazeta have also been victims of violence. In April 2022, its historic director, Dmitry Muratov, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few months earlier, was the victim of a chemical attack that almost left him blind. And in Chechnya, they kidnapped and beat one of their collaborators, Elena Milashina, almost to the point of death. Since its founding in 1993, seven journalists from this publication have been murdered for doing their job.

The most remembered death is that of Anna Politkovskaya, shot in the doorway of her home on September 20, 2006. The dismantling of the newspaper comes a few days after the twentieth anniversary of her murder was commemorated. The closure will also force the dismantling of her desk from the newsroom, kept intact since she was killed and turned into a museum of her legacy as a benchmark for free Russian journalism.