Novaya Gazeta, the venerable investigative Russian newspaper whose reporting staff included the slain Anna Politkovskaya and at least five others who were killed or died under suspicious circumstances, announced it was shutting down.
"They killed us," the paper's top editors said in a Telegram post on October 30, a day after authorities began evicting the remaining staff from their Moscow editorial offices.
The paper, which had mostly suspended work in March 2022, after Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine, will formally cease operations on November 9, editors said.
Founded in the early 1990s and partly funded by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta drew renown for its investigative work, eschewing a mass-market tabloid journalism model for serious longform reporting and dirt-digging.
Politkovskaya -- whose columns about the wars in Chechnya and repressive government there -- was one of the paper's best known journalists. She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building in October 2006.
The editorial offices of Novaya Gazeta, pictured in March 2022
Another reporter who investigated military corruption and the mysterious 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings, Yury Shchekochikhin, died suddenly in July 2003, several days before he was scheduled to fly to the United States. Colleagues and others have suggested he was poisoned.
Other reporters and contributors who were killed -- "for fulfilling their professional and civic duties" -- included Igor Domnikov, Stas Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and Natalia Estemirova.
Its longtime editor, Dmitry Muratov, was a corecipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, for his efforts to keep the newspaper publishing amid increasingly repressive media environment inside Russia.
The newspaper had struggled in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, after a series of warnings from a government regulator.
In 2024, some of Novaya Gazeta's editorial staff opened a European edition for the paper -- based in Paris, with support from press advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders.
"For nearly five years of war, we managed to keep working while being completely encircled by security services," the editors said.
"Now it is over. We have found ourselves in the 'kill zone'," they said, a reference to parts of the front line in Ukraine where casualties are the highest.