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“We have been killed,” reads a statement from the editorial team behind the Russian independent news outlet Novaya Gazeta, as it announced on Friday that it would be ceasing operations.
“On November 9th, we will turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years, shut down our servers, and leave,” the paper said. “The newspaper no longer exists. The Russian authorities and the Russian security services have forced our editorial team to cease its operations.”
The paper is one of the few Russian outlets that has been openly critical of Russia’s war in Ukraine, but it has come under increasing pressure from Moscow, which revoked its media licence in 2022 and has detained its journalists.
The outlet said its team were now also being evicted from its headquarters on Potapovsky Lane in Moscow and that the donations platform it used to receive financial support from readers had also been closed down.
“We have been stripped of all our resources. Entirely,” it said, calling it a “coordinated campaign.”
“Banks which have cut us off tell us they are merely following internal corporate rules. They don’t tell us that the rules they follow are set by the FSB, the state security service, embedded in every organsiation. They see the country as their personal fiefdom,” the statement continued.
It added that since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it had been unable to report on the “most critical and tragic events of our time” and that censorship applied to “virtually every sphere of civic life.”
One final issue of the paper is still set to be published, however.
Independent Russian journalists have issued a statement in support of Novaya Gazeta.
“The story of the most important independent publication in modern Russia has come to an end. Novaya was a unique newspaper from the moment it was founded right up to the very end. There is not a single other newsroom on the market with such a curriculum vitae: this refers both to the list of phenomenal investigations and outstanding texts, and to the list of awards, including Dmitry Muratov’s Nobel Prize, and to the list of murdered journalists,” a text published by the Meduza outlet reads.
“By all measures this was the best media outlet in the history of Russia,” it added.
Along with the newsroom, the museum of journalist Anna Politkovskaya is also closing; it was opened in her office on 7 October 2021, on the 15th anniversary of her murder.
Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993 by Sergei Kushnerev, Pavel Voshchanov, Akram Murtazaev, Dmitry Sabov and Dmitry Muratov.
The editorial office’s first computers were purchased with the help of former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the end of March 2022, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Novaya suspended its work due to warnings from media monitoring agency Roskomnadzor but later resumed operations.
After the start of the war, some of its journalists left Russia and set up Novaya Gazeta Europe, which has its main office in Latvia.