Dutch publisher and journalist Derk Sauer, best known for launching The Moscow Times, has died following a sailing accident in Greece.

Sauer, 72, injured his back in an accident while sailing in Greece at the end of last month. He was first treated in Athens and then in the Netherlands and, the Parool said, died surrounded by his family at his holiday home in Zeeland.

Sauer moved to Russia at the end of the 1980s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he introduced brands such as Playboy and Cosmopolitan to the Russian market.

Then in 1992, Sauer launched The Moscow Times, initially aimed at providing independent information to expats living in the country. He became sole owner of the paper after buying it back from Finnish publishing house Sanoma eight years ago.

In 2022, The Moscow Times relocated to Amsterdam after the Russian government imposed severe new laws restricting coverage of the war in Ukraine. In 2024, Russia blacklisted the paper as an “undesirable organisation”.

His son Pjotr, a journalist for The Guardian, said that words could not express “what an extraordinary father and husband he was”.

“He devoted his life to defending independent Russian media and at the end of his life, he asked that we continue to support the free press.”

Sauer was an “adventurer in heart and soul”, the Parool, where he had a weekly column, said in its obituary. “But he was always a journalist, with a sharp eye for injustice.”

The NRC described him as an entrepreneur, a publisher and an activist. “In his youth he was a convinced Marxist. In Moscow he organised trade fairs for millionaires,” he paper said. “Derk Sauer fought to the end for a free press in Russia.”