New RSF Video: twenty years after the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist’s warnings resonate more than ever

"So what on earth did I do that was so despicable? I simply wrote about what I had witnessed. Nothing more." These words are from a text by Anna Politkovskaya on her computer after she was assassinated. Twenty years later, four French actresses - Julie Gayet, Ariane Ascaride, Bérénice Bejo and Mélanie Doutey - read her words aloud in a new video by RSF.

In this text, Anna Politkovskaya describes a Russia where journalists were already being divided into "our people" and "the others." The former are rewarded by those in power; the latter are condemned to the status of outcasts. She also mentions, almost in passing, what she herself had endured: "the poisoning, the arrests, the threats I've received by mail and online, the promises to kill me…" The essential point, she writes, lies elsewhere: preserving the ability to practice her profession, to "describe life" and to tell the stories of those whom those in power would like to silence.

Breaking the silence on Chechnya

In a second video produced by RSF, Abdulla Duduev, co-founder of the independent Chechen magazine Dosh, remembers the woman he first met in 1999, at the beginning of the Second Chechen War. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, had published numerous reports on massive human rights violations and abuses against civilians. She had, he recalls, "opened a breach in the blockade" to inform the world about what was really happening in Chechnya.

He reminisces about a deeply empathetic journalist who refused to remain detached from the suffering she witnessed. "She showed that a journalist can be human," he emphasises.

Anna Politkovskaya also played a direct role in the creation of Dosh. Faced with the anti-Chechen propaganda dominating Russian media at the time, she encouraged her Chechen colleagues to tell their own story and present their own culture and society. "That is how Dosh magazine was born. It was her idea, her proposal," says Abdulla Duduev.

For Abdulla Duduev, Anna Politkovskaya understood, above all, that the violence and arbitrariness deployed by the Russian authorities in Chechnya would not stop at its borders. Twenty years after her death, he sees the widespread repression in Russia and Russia's aggression against Ukraine as confirmation of her warnings.

Twenty years of impunity and repression

Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead on 7 October 2006, in her apartment building on Lesnaya Street in Moscow. Several men involved in her assassination were convicted, including five who were sentenced in 2014 to prison terms ranging from twelve years to life in jail. But twenty years after the crime, the individuals who ordered her killing remain unidentified. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Russia had failed to conduct an effective investigation to determine who had ordered the murder. The statute of limitations expired in October 2021.

Over these twenty years, the space available to independent journalism in Russia has steadily and systematically narrowed. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, virtually all independent media outlets have been banned, blocked, designated as "foreign agents" or "undesirable organisations," or forced into exile.

Novaya Gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya's newspaper, is a textbook victim of this repression. Six of its journalists and contributors have been murdered since 2000. Its print and online licenses were revoked in 2022, and its former editor-in-chief, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, was designated a "foreign agent" in 2023. On 4 September 2026, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated Novaya Gazeta as a "foreign agent" and added 106 people linked to the newspaper to the list of individuals "affiliated with foreign agents."