Twenty years on, Anna Politkovskaya is imprinted in many people’s minds as a courageous journalist who covered the second Chechnya war (1999–2009) during the first years of the unexpected ascension to power of a “a lieutenant colonel who never managed to reach the rank of colonel” (in her words), that is Vladimir Putin. Her coverage of that war revealed untold war crimes, civilian massacres, atrocities… In short, a prelude to the way Putin will wage his “special operation” in Ukraine sixteen years later.
Politkovskaya was poisoned once, received multiple death threats, was arrested and released a few hours later in Chechnya by Russian officers in 2001, and yet she kept on denouncing human rights violations by the Russia army, and calling for freedom of expression.
Eventually, refusing to relent and migrate to Austria as her editor-in-chief had advised her to, 48-year-old Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006 – incidentally, Putin’s birthday. The perpetrators, men affiliated with the FSB, Russia’s security services, were eventually brought to justice and convicted, but not the mastermind. In November 2023, President Vladimir Putin pardoned a former law enforcement officer involved in the murder after he served in one of the Russian military units made up of convicts sent to Ukraine.
“Reporter, investigative journalist, whistleblower, human rights activist – Politkovskaya was all of these at once”, writes Isabelle Mandraud in Le Monde.[1] Winner of the 2004 PEN Award for Freedom of Expression,[2] Politkovskaya worked for Novaya Gazeta, “Russia’s biggest opposition newspaper”, according to the Washington Post.[3] Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Dmitri Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. The independent tabloid ended up being banned in Russia in September 2022. It has since been operating from Latvia, Germany and France under the new name of Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Politkovskaya was the third Novaya Gazeta journalist to be assassinated, after Igor Domnikov (2000) and Iouri Chtchekotchikhine (2003). In 2009, two more Novaya Gazeta’ freelance journalists, Natalya Estemirova and Anastasia Barburova, were murdered.
Between 2000 and 2022, thirty Russian journalists – a number liable to be underestimated, including six from Novaya Gazeta – paid with their lives their commitment to justice and freedom of the press.
Writers in Prison Coordinator, Hélène Jaccomard
Photo: Blaues Sofa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
[1] Isabelle Mandraud, “Anna Politkovskaya: The journalist killed 20 years ago for understanding Putin before anyone else”, Le Monde (English) 6 October 2026
[2] www.pen-international.org/news/pen-award-for-freedom-of-expression (accessed 6 October 2026)
[3] washingtonpost.com, 26 octobre 2017 (accessed 6 October 2026).