Novaya Gazeta, founded in 1993 and designated by Russian authorities as a “foreign agent” in September 2026, is ceasing operations. The editorial team announced the decision after being evicted from the building where it had worked for the past 30 years.

Novaya Gazeta, the best known of the independent media outlets still working in Russia, said it is shutting down. A day earlier, it was reported that the newsroom was being evicted from its office on Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow, where its journalists had worked for the past 29 years. The Anna Politkovskaya Museum, set up in the office where she worked, will close as well. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities blocked the outlet’s website and revoked the newspaper’s license. In September 2026, Novaya was designated a “foreign agent.” According to The Economist, the editorial board met on Oct. 26 and decided to close the paper. On the morning of Oct. 30, Novaya formally announced that it was ceasing operations. The editorial team’s full statement follows.

They have killed us

On Nov. 9 we will turn off the lights in the building that has been our home for 30 years, shut down our servers and walk out. The newspaper is no more. The Russian government and Russian special services have forced the newsroom to stop work.

More than three decades of our lives, lived alongside our country and its citizens, are ending with us penniless and on the street, under the constant threat of repression.

For many of those years we were happy, with creativity and hope, readers, friends, texts and films. Sometimes those years were very bitter.

They were bitter not in the lawless 1990s, but under this very regime, when colleagues were killed for political reasons, for doing their professional and civic duty: Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalya Estemirova.

Along with the eviction notice, our donation system, which allowed readers to support us, was shut down. In other words, we were cut off from funding entirely.

This is a coordinated action. The banks’ claims that they are acting under their own internal corporate rules convince no one. These are rules imposed from outside by the state’s repressive apparatus, by FSB officers who have embedded themselves in every organization. They treat the country as their property.

When the war began, we, like all other journalists, were denied the chance to report on the most important and tragic events of our time. Laws were passed that brought censorship back to the country, and it later spread to nearly every area of human life.

The authorities blocked all our internet resources. The state seized our printing house, and intelligence officers embedded in other publishing houses refused to print our paper. Many of our staff were forced to leave the country.

Then the state struck us from the media register and took away our right to earn a living by our own work.

Editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was attacked and came within a hair’s breadth of losing his sight. The perpetrators are known, yet no criminal case was opened.

Then they began declaring “foreign agents,” from the editor-in-chief down to all our journalists.

Then an administrative case was opened against the newsroom’s leadership.

In Chechnya, our columnist Elena Milashina was abducted and beaten nearly to death.

Oleg Roldugin, the newspaper’s editor, was taken hostage on charges stemming from his work as a journalist. His trial is imminent.

Novaya Gazeta’s newsroom was searched at length, as was the editor-in-chief’s apartment.

This September, more than 100 people, the entire newsroom along with journalists and contributors, were designated “foreign agents.”

We spent nearly five years of the war surrounded by the security services.

Now it is all over. We are in the “kill zone.”

This is not only our own story. It is the story of a country and a society being destroyed in the same way.

It is being done by the FSB, the Justice Ministry, the prosecutor’s office and others who have privatized the state and seized power. This is not Soviet nostalgia. Behind its mask, an almost military dictatorship has already been built.

They say they are defending the constitutional order. No, this is an order that runs against the constitution. The Constitution has been raped, beaten, gagged and thrown into prison for a long term, like thousands of citizens who simply followed its provisions, and like tens of thousands of others who were forced to abandon their homes, leave for the unknown and become refugees.

Stop saying that today is not Stalin’s 1937, that repression has some kind of “digital character.” This is state repression. In the cells, it is people who die, not numbers. Full stop.

Human life has lost its meaning and its value.

The word “constitution” now provokes bitter laughter. Everywhere. Even among judges. Especially among judges. No one believes it is this country’s basic law, or that the president swore an oath to it. Note that official propaganda no longer calls the president the guarantor of the Constitution.

Human rights and freedoms in the country have been destroyed, and defending them has been equated with a crime. Elections and elected bodies of power have been abolished de facto. Social institutions have been dismantled. Freedom of conscience and human dignity have been trampled. Private life has been rummaged through with dirty hands.

Doesn’t Article 29 of the Constitution, “censorship is prohibited,” sound like mockery today? The court has been destroyed along with law and justice. Having convictions is now tantamount to treason.

But the real treason is the state’s betrayal of its own Constitution. And that treason is an ongoing crime, committed before the eyes of the whole world.

The killing of Novaya Gazeta is further proof of it.

That is exactly what we wrote about in recent years, as best we could and as far as we were able. That is why they killed us.

Thank you to everyone who listened to us.

The editorial team

P.S. The final issue will be published.