MOSCOW -- The Moscow City Court has upheld the decision of a lower court to withdraw the licenses of the Novaya gazeta newspaper and its Novaya rasskaz-gazeta magazine, two of the last independent media outlets in the country, amid a crackdown on the free press during the Kremlin's war against Ukraine.
The court ruled on February 7 that the decision to withdraw the media outlets’ licenses by the Basmanny district court in September was correct and cannot be changed.
In November, Russian authorities blocked access to Novaya gazeta's website. Previous to that, the newspaper in March was forced to suspend publication online and in print after Russia introduced strict new censorship laws.
Shortly after the Moscow City Court pronounced its decision, Kirill Martynov, the chief editor of Novaya gazeta's project in the EU, Novaya gazeta. Europe, condemned the ruling.
"The court in Moscow just destroyed Novaya gazeta, Russia's oldest independent media outlet. We always opposed to war, our six journalists were murdered and our editor-in-chief received the Nobel Peace Prize a few months before Putin invaded Ukraine. It will not end like this," Martynov wrote on Twitter.
Russian authorities have used courts to intensify pressure on the free press since the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February last year.
Novaya gazeta was founded in part with money from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and had been one of the most respected publications in post-Soviet Russia since 1993. It suspended operations inside the country in March after being forced to remove material from its website on Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine.
Some members of the paper’s staff left Russia after it stopped publishing and launched the newspaper's new project Novaya gazeta. Europe from Latvia's capital, Riga. Russia's media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has blocked that website inside Russia as well.
Novaya gazeta’s chief editor Dmitry Muratov, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has remained in Russia despite his vocal opposition to the conflict in Ukraine.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Moscow quickly adopted a law criminalizing the dissemination of “false” information that “discredits the armed forces.” The law has been central to a massive crackdown against dissent over the war in Russia.