Russia just shut down its last major independent newspaper

Russia's most prominent independent newspaper just shut down for good.

Novaya Gazeta closed its Moscow newsroom a day ago. That's 33 years of reporting, gone. The paper survived six murdered journalists and a full-scale war. It didn't survive this.

So what actually happened? Russian authorities designated the paper a "foreign agent" back in September. That one move cut off the bank transfers Novaya Gazeta relied on from reader donations. No donations, no money, no paper.

Two weeks ago the paper got formal notice to leave its office on Potapovsky Lane in central Moscow by 9 November. Sergei Sokolov, the editor-in-chief, said it himself in a video 10 days before the deadline. He said the paper would shut down its servers and leave the home it had worked from for 30 years.

And that's exactly what happened.

Sokolov led the final editorial meeting at the office. Dmitry Muratov was there too — he co-founded the paper, used to run it, and shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Journalists from other outlets came to watch it close. Sokolov said the paper's Telegram channel would keep running until midnight, even though the newspaper itself was already finished.

Then staff took the portraits down.

Six murdered colleagues hung on those newsroom walls. One of them was Anna Politkovskaya. She investigated the Russian military's abuses in Chechnya and criticised Vladimir Putin's rule. She was found dead in her own Moscow apartment block in 2006.

Staff walked out to applause. People outside were shouting "Thank you!" Someone covered the building's sign with a new one. It reads: "Novaya Gazeta lived here."

Muratov spoke to the crowd. He said people in Russia who want peace have been denied the right to read what they choose. He said the constitution's guarantees on political and civil rights have effectively stopped working.

That's the paper's own co-founder saying Russia's constitution no longer protects what it promises to.

Here's where it started. Novaya Gazeta was founded in 1993, right after the Soviet Union collapsed. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, put his own 1990 Nobel Peace Prize money into launching it. The paper spent the decades since investigating corruption, the war in Chechnya and the Kremlin itself. Six of its journalists and contributors were murdered along the way.

It kept going after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, even as the government shut down almost every other independent outlet left in the country. This year the pressure reached the paper's own leadership. Sokolov's home was searched in October and he was taken in for questioning. Oleg Roldugin, one of the paper's editors, was arrested in April.

The Kremlin is calling this routine. Dmitry Peskov, its press secretary, says quote "a normal process of turnover".

That's the Kremlin describing the end of the country's last major independent newspaper as nothing unusual.

Volker Türk doesn't see it that way. He's the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, and he called the closure another blow for remaining independent media in Russia.

So where does that leave Russia? With no major news organisation left reporting from inside the country outside state control. Not one.

Nobody knows yet if any of the staff will try to relaunch the paper from abroad, the way other exiled Russian outlets have done since 2022.

The lights are off at Potapovsky Lane. Whether Novaya Gazeta exists anywhere else now is the only question left.