Russia's Last Independent Newspaper Is Gone — Why Novaya Gazeta Closed

On Monday, November 9, 2026, the lights went out at Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow. After 33 years, Novaya Gazeta — Russia's last major independent newspaper still operating inside the country — closed its offices, shut down its servers, and left. "We have been killed," its editorial team had warned ten days earlier. "The newspaper no longer exists. The Russian authorities and the Russian security services have forced our editorial team to cease its operations."

What the paper was

Founded in April 1993, partly with money from Mikhail Gorbachev's Nobel Peace Prize, Novaya Gazeta built its reputation on reporting Russians could not get anywhere else: corruption at the highest levels, human rights abuses, and the wars in Chechnya in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It became the go-to source for Russians who wanted more than the official narrative, and a symbol of the press holding power to account. Its former editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 alongside Philippine journalist Maria Ressa — an award that, for a time, seemed to offer the paper a measure of protection.

The price of staying

That protection did not last. Under Vladimir Putin, in power as prime minister or president since 1999, the newspaper was ruthlessly persecuted. Five of its journalists were killed, including investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in 2006, and a lawyer the paper worked with was killed too. Its website was blocked, forcing readers onto VPNs. Its print and online publishing licenses were revoked in 2022, after it opposed the invasion of Ukraine, and its printing presses were seized. In September 2026, the paper and people associated with it — including Muratov — were labelled "foreign agents". Finally, Novaya Gazeta was evicted from its offices and its donation platform was shut down, stripping it of all financial resources and making closure inevitable. As the Committee to Protect Journalists put it, the closure was "a dark day for independent media everywhere".

How the end came

The end was announced on October 30, when editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov said in an emotional video statement that the paper was "ending its existence". On its final day, journalists slowly removed the portraits of their slain colleagues from the newsroom walls. Muratov attended the closing ceremony alongside the editorial board. The team is now rushing to move its archive to GitHub, the code-sharing platform, so decades of reporting survive even as the institution dies. The exile offshoot, Novaya Gazeta Europe, will continue to publish from abroad — but inside Russia, the paper is gone. More than 30 journalists from various outlets are currently in prison in Russia, according to Le Monde, and the closure marks a new low in Moscow's campaign against dissenting voices that accelerated after troops were sent into Ukraine in February 2022.

Novaya Gazeta survived the suspension of publication in March 2022, the loss of its licenses, the blocking of its website, and the killing of its reporters. What it could not survive was the combination of eviction, financial strangulation and the "foreign agent" label applied to its people. Its closure does not end independent Russian journalism — that continues from exile — but it ends the era in which a critical newspaper could still operate, however precariously, from inside Moscow. For the war that reshaped Russia's media landscape, see our reports on Europe joining the Ukraine peace talks in Abu Dhabi and Iran's two-day ultimatum to the United States. And for why governments everywhere are suddenly telling citizens to prepare, see our explainer on the global stockpiling wave.

Sources: Committee to Protect Journalists, The Times of Israel.