Novaya Gazeta closes Moscow newsroom under state pressure

Novaya Gazeta, the investigative newspaper co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, held its last editorial meeting and closed its Moscow newsroom on Monday after Russian authorities designated it a foreign agent and banks stopped processing the reader donations it lived on.

Why it matters: The closure ends one of the last independent newsrooms still operating inside Russia, a paper founded in 1993 whose reporters included the murdered Anna Politkovskaya and whose founding editor Dmitry Muratov shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Data as of November 9, 2026, Toronto: Deutsche Welle (with AFP, AP and Reuters) and Al Jazeera reporting of the November 9, 2026 closure, read in full in this run. Developing item.

Novaya Gazeta closed its Moscow newsroom on Monday, holding its last editorial meeting a month after announcing it was being forced to shut down. The paper, one of the few outlets inside Russia still criticising the war on Ukraine, was designated a foreign agent in September, was ordered to vacate its premises, and said banks had since stopped processing the reader donations it depended on after moving wholly online; its editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov had his home searched in October, and another editor was arrested in April.

Founding editor Dmitry Muratov, who shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, told journalists gathered for the closure that Russians who advocate for peace had been denied the right to read what they choose, while the Kremlin played the closure down as part of a normal cycle of change in a competitive media landscape. Founded in 1993 with money from Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize, the paper lost six journalists to murder over its life, among them Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.

Novaya Gazeta closes Moscow newsroom under state pressure

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