The newspaper Sovereignthe only one to feature a photo of opposition leader Alexey Navalny on its front page shortly after his sudden death in prison, announced the end of its activities on Tuesday (17), after being declared a foreign agent by Vladimir Putin’s regime.
“We are the weekly ‘Sobesednik’, the first color newspaper in the Soviet Union, which went on sale on February 23, 1984, and the last remaining independent print media in Russia,” journalist Yelena Milchanovskaya told the channel. SOTAvision from Telegram.
The journalist reported that both the weekly and other publications from the publishing group will stop being sold at newsstands “in the coming months”.
Milchanovskaya said the editorial team would appeal against the inclusion of the newspaper in the register of foreign agents by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
“On the last page of ‘Sobesednik’ we always wrote: ‘Thank you for reading us, see you in a week’. Now we say: ‘Thank you for reading us, see you next time’,” he said.
On February 21, five days after the opposition leader’s death, the weekly included a large photo of Navalny smiling and waving on its front page, while the paper’s inside pages reported on the death and accusations by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, whom she blamed for her husband’s death.
Hours later, authorities removed nearly all copies of the newspaper from newsstands in the Russian capital Moscow.
“All this is very serious and even a little scary for us. Why did they seize it? We don’t know. We didn’t break any laws,” Milchanovskaya said at the time.
The state-controlled Russian press and television completely ignored Navalny’s death, with the exception of the economic newspaper RBC.
At the time, the editor of New GazetteDmitry Muratov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, denounced the “genocide” of independent media in Russia, where hundreds of outlets have been closed since the start of the war in Ukraine.
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