Novaya Gazeta to close on November 9 after 30 years, says Russian security services forced it out

Novaya Gazeta, the Russian investigative newspaper whose editor shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, announced on Friday that it will close on November 9 after three decades. Editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov said in a video statement that the country's security services had forced the newsroom to stop working. The announcement came a day after authorities began evicting the remaining staff from their Moscow offices.

"Novaya Gazeta has been killed," Sokolov said, adding that the team would turn off the lights and shut down the servers on that date. In a separate message on Telegram, the top editors summed it up in three words: "They killed us."

The last month inside a newsroom under siege

The closure follows a run of direct pressure on senior staff. This month Sokolov was taken in for questioning and his home was searched, in a criminal case involving his colleague Oleg Roldugin.

Roldugin was arrested in April and charged with "unlawful access to computerised information", with no details made public. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial under house arrest, which runs until November 10, the day after the paper is due to go dark.

The editors said they had kept working through nearly five years of war "completely encircled" by security services. They compared their position to the "kill zone", the term used for the deadliest stretches of the front line in Ukraine. The Anna Politkovskaya Museum, named after the paper's murdered reporter, is also reported to be closing with the eviction.

A paper that paid for its reporting with lives

Novaya Gazeta built its name on long investigations instead of mass-market news, and it became known above all for its work on Chechnya and corruption. Politkovskaya's reporting from the Chechen wars made her internationally famous before she was killed.

Others followed or came before her. Yury Shchekochikhin, who investigated military corruption and the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, died suddenly in July 2003, days before a planned trip to the United States; colleagues have suggested he was poisoned. Igor Domnikov, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova and Natalia Estemirova were also killed. The paper has said they died for doing their professional and civic duties.

What is left of independent journalism in Russia

Since February 2022, Russia has brought in wartime censorship laws that pushed most independent journalists into exile. Novaya Gazeta was classed as a "foreign agent", a label that adds heavy reporting rules and warns readers off, and it was one of the last well-known independent titles still trying to operate from inside the country.

Its closure leaves Russian readers more reliant on outlets working from abroad, many of them blocked at home and reachable only through VPNs. For the wider region, it removes a rare domestic source of reporting on the war, the army and the security services.

The next dates are close together: the newsroom empties on November 9, and Roldugin's current house arrest order runs until November 10. What happens to the archive, and to the staff still in Russia, has not been spelled out.