‘They Killed Us’: Muckraking Russian Newspaper Novaya Gazeta Announces Closure

Novaya Gazeta, the age-old investigative Russian paper whose reporting personnel consisted of the killed Anna Politkovskaya and a minimum of 5 others who were eliminated or passed away under suspicious situations, revealed it was closing down.

“They killed us,” the paper’s leading editors stated in a Telegram post on October 30, a day after authorities started kicking out the staying personnel from their Moscow editorial workplaces.

The paper, which had actually mainly suspended operate in March 2022 following Russia’s full-scale intrusion of Ukraine, will officially stop operations on November 9, editors stated.

Established in the early 1990s and partially moneyed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta drew renown for its investigative work, avoiding a mass-market tabloid journalism design for major long-form reporting and dirt-digging.

Politkovskaya, whose columns dealt with the wars in Chechnya and the repressive federal government there, was among the paper’s finest understood reporters. She was assassinated in her Moscow apartment in October 2006.

Another press reporter who examined military corruption and the strange 1999 Moscow apartment battles, Yury Shchekochikhin, dropped dead in July 2003, numerous days before he was arranged to fly to the United States. Associates and others have actually recommended he was poisoned.

Other press reporters and factors who were eliminated “for fulfilling their professional and civic duties” consist of Igor Domnikov, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and Natalia Estemirova.

Its long time editor, Dmitry Muratov, was a co-recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to keep the paper publishing amidst significantly repressive media environment inside Russia.

The paper had actually had a hard time in the after-effects of the Ukraine intrusion, after a series of cautions from a federal government regulator.

“After the outbreak of hostilities, we, like all other journalists, were deprived of the opportunity to report on the most important and tragic events of our time,” the editors stated in their October 30 post.

“What Novaya Gazeta and its journalists have done over the last five years from inside the country is truly a feat,” stated Ekaterina Fomina, a previous longtime press reporter with Novaya Gazeta.

“We have seen just how selflessly a person can fight, to continue to tell stories of people living within the country, people who are themselves facing repression and hardships,” she stated in an interview with Current Time “They truly acted with great selflessness — perhaps, unfortunately, even to excess. And now sadly, they are being punished for it.”

“They indeed have been killed,” she stated.

For more than years, Russian authorities have actually slowly squeezed independent media outlets, in addition to civil society groups, rights activists, and others, utilizing punitive “foreign agent” and “undesirable organization” laws to threaten and silence people.

Even the Telegram post revealing the closure consisted of a “foreign agent” caution, something mandated by law.

In 2024, a few of Novaya Gazeta’s editorial personnel opened a European edition for the paper based in Paris, with assistance from press advocacy company Reporters Without Borders.

“For nearly five years of war, we managed to keep working while being completely encircled by security services,” the editors stated.

“Now it is over. We have found ourselves in the ‘kill zone’,” they stated, a referral to parts of the cutting edge in Ukraine where casualties are the greatest.