Putin cannot conquer Ukraine, only destroy it, Nobel laureate Muratov tells BBC

The newsroom of Novaya Gazeta sits in silence now. Dmitry Muratov walks through corridors that once hummed with the work of Russia's most fearless independent journalists, and there is nothing left to hum about. "There is no newspaper anymore," he tells the BBC's Steve Rosenberg in an exclusive interview. The man who co-founded this publication more than three decades ago, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for defending freedom of expression, now stands in a building that no longer belongs to him.

Novaya Gazeta was the flagship of hard-hitting Russian journalism. It exposed human rights abuses and corruption at the highest levels. Six of its journalists were killed in pursuit of that work, including Anna Politkovskaya, whose reporting on the war in Chechnya made her a target. The Nobel Committee recognized Muratov's courage. But a prize could not protect what he had built. In 2022, Putin issued a decree. The printing presses were seized by the state. The newspaper's registration was revoked. Today, Novaya Gazeta exists only online, and even that presence is strangled—its website blocked inside Russia, accessible only through VPNs or from abroad.

What happened to one newspaper reflects what has happened across the country. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has systematized the silencing of dissent. Opinion leaders have been branded as foreign agents, extremists, or terrorists—several hundred of them. At least 1,500 people now sit in Russian prisons for speaking against the war, Muratov says. That is three times the number of prisoners of conscience that Amnesty International documented in the entire Soviet Union during the 1980s. The scale of repression has outpaced even the darkest chapters of Soviet history.

Meanwhile, the war itself has become something Putin cannot win, no matter how it ends. Nearly five years in, the conflict has killed more than a million people. Muratov speaks with the precision of a journalist who has studied the data: "You can destroy it, but you cannot conquer it." He means Ukraine. He means that continued escalation—even to nuclear weapons—would be destruction, not victory. When asked if he truly believes Putin would use nuclear weapons, Muratov refuses to speculate about what goes on inside the president's mind. "All those political experts who say 'Putin thinks this' or 'Putin is scared of that'—they're all charlatans," he says. "It's in the same league as astrology." But he has watched the rhetoric shift. Since the beginning of the year, the need for nuclear weapons has been mentioned more than 500 times in Russian discourse. He has heard it discussed on state television. He has heard it at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a state-run event, where speakers have framed nuclear weapons use as something favorable, something good.

The invasion was supposed to secure Russia. Muratov asks the obvious question: Has security increased? Ukrainian drones now attack Russian warehouses. There are fuel shortages, internet disruptions, thousands of political prisoners. The answer is no. Yet Putin maintains his grip on power, held in place by fear and the apparatus of the Federal Security Service. Muratov has few illusions about the West either. He knows that European leaders lecture Putin about human rights while signing trade deals for oil and gas. Putin, he says, laughs at the contradiction.

Muratov himself has been designated a foreign agent—a label designed to punish and stigmatize, to mark him as an enemy within. But he does not dwell on his own pressures. Instead, he opens a folder and pulls out photographs. They are portraits of prisoners. Four journalists—Antonina Favorskaya, Konstantin Gabov, Sergey Karelin, and Artyom Kriger—convicted on extremism charges for alleged links to Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption organization. Alexei Gorinov, a city councillor jailed for spreading false information about the military after he spoke against the war. And Pavel Kushnir, a pianist of exceptional talent, an interpreter of Rachmaninoff and Schubert, arrested for posting anti-war videos. Muratov holds up a second image of Kushnir. "And this is him in his coffin." The musician died in pre-trial detention during a hunger strike. He was 39.

Yet even in this bleakness, Muratov finds something to hold onto. On the streets of Moscow, people whisper their gratitude to him and his colleagues. They do not speak loudly—the cost is too high—but they speak. What people think, he says, is very important. It is a small thing, a whisper in a silenced country. But it is what remains when everything else has been taken.