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Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s last independent newspapers, shut down its Moscow newsroom on Monday after years of mounting pressure from the Kremlin.

Getting into it: Staff held a final editorial meeting at the Potapovsky Lane office they’d worked out of for 30 years, then pulled the framed photos of six slain colleagues off the walls, including Anna Politkovskaya, who documented Russian war crimes in Chechnya and was gunned down at her apartment building in 2006. As staff walked out for the last time, crowds applauded and shouted “thank you,” and a new sign went up above the paper’s nameplate: “Here lived Novaya Gazeta.”

Founded in 1993, the paper built its name digging into corruption and rights abuses, but faced a growing crackdown after Russia invaded Ukraine. Authorities fined it for “discrediting” the armed forces, labeled it a “foreign agent,” knocked its websites offline, took over its printing operation, stripped its media registration, cut off the reader donations that kept it running and finally ordered it out of its offices. Its former editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize co-winner, was attacked with red paint on a train in 2022 and left the top job in 2023 once the government slapped the foreign agent label on him too. In a final statement, the paper said human rights and freedoms “have been abolished” in Russia.

“This isn’t goodbye. We will find a way. Because Novaya Gazeta isn’t pages or a website; it’s an idea,” said editor-in-chief Sergei Sokolov. “As soon as the slightest first signs appear, Novaya Gazeta will come back to you, our readers and our colleagues.”

Another view: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the idea that the closure marks the end of independent media in Russia, calling it part of an “ordinary rotation process” where some papers fold and others replace them.

This all comes as some of the paper’s staff who fled Russia in 2022 continue to run Novaya Gazeta Europe, a spinoff outlet that keeps up its criticism of the Kremlin and the war in Ukraine.