Masked agents stormed the newsroom and arrested a journalist

Security officers raided the Moscow office of Russia's leading independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta today, and state media reported that a prominent journalist had been arrested.

The state-run RIA news agency, citing police sources, said that journalist Oleg Roldugin was being questioned over alleged misuse of personal data.

A short video was also released showing several masked security officers escorting a man to a van and throwing him inside.

Russia has tightened censorship laws and increased pressure on independent media since it launched the war in Ukraine in 2022.

In a separate case, Russia's FSB security service said today it had detained a former freelance journalist for Radio Free Europe on suspicion of treason for allegedly passing information to Ukrainian intelligence.

In another move aimed at stifling dissent, Russia's Supreme Court ruled the same day that the leading human rights organization Memorial is an extremist movement, paving the way for criminal prosecution of anyone who supports it, donates to it, or shares its materials.

Roldugin, the arrested journalist, previously ran the weekly Sobesednik, whose publisher was labeled a “foreign agent” a few months after it published a front-page story about the death of leading dissident Alexei Navalny in a penal colony in 2024. Later that year, the paper was forced to suspend publication of the weekly.

A journalist recently published an article in Novaya Gazeta investigating how a former aide to the nephew of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov managed to obtain one of the most expensive penthouses in Russia.

Novaya Gazeta said Roldugin was taken in for questioning after his apartment was searched on Thursday morning. The paper added that it could not confirm whether the searches at its editorial office were related to the case.

Novaya Gazeta is one of Russia's most famous investigative media outlets. Its editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, was one of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, and he dedicated the award to the six journalists from his newspaper who were killed for their work.

In 2023, Muratov was declared a “foreign agent,” a designation given by authorities to individuals and organizations they believe are acting against Russia with foreign support.