Novaya Gazeta’s Moscow newsroom says it will close on 9 November

Novaya Gazeta’s Moscow newsroom announced on Friday that it would stop work. It plans to leave the office it has occupied for nearly 30 years and switch off its servers on 9 November, ending the work of a prominent independent newsroom inside Russia. It also promised one final issue.

“They chose to strangle us,” co-founder Dmitry Muratov told BBC Russia editor Steven Rosenberg, who reported that staff were packing up at the Moscow office. Muratov received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for his work defending freedom of expression.

The newspaper says it lost the ability to receive readers’ donations at the same time as it was told to leave its office. Editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov told readers that staff had until 9 November to vacate the building, according to Mediazona, which says it has a copy of his letter. Sokolov said the move would also close the museum in the former office of Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist murdered in 2006.

The newsroom accuses Russian authorities and security services of a coordinated effort to force it out. It says banks cited internal corporate rules for refusing donations. The Russian justice ministry did place Novaya Gazeta’s online edition on its ‘foreign agents’ register in September. The ministry cited the publication’s opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine and accused it of spreading inaccurate information about government policy. Earlier, a Moscow court revoked the paper edition’s registration in 2022 following a case brought by the media regulator, according to RBC.

Those measures establish a history of official action against the paper, but not who ordered its departure from the building or whether security services directed banks’ decisions. Financial pressure also predates this month’s events: The Bell, citing accounts for the non-profit organisation behind the newsroom, reports that its receipts fell from 231 million roubles in 2021 to 59.5 million in 2025. That earlier decline does not settle the newsroom’s allegation about the loss of its office and donations.

The closure announcement concerns the Moscow newsroom, not Novaya Gazeta Europe, a separate publication established in Riga in April 2022. The office departure, server shutdown and final issue remain planned steps, not events that had already happened when the newspaper made its announcement.