Journalists at the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti have rebelled against their new management after the paper’s editor was accused of banning criticism of constitutional amendments backed by Vladimir Putin and the use of data from an independent pollster.

In a blistering opinion article published on the newspaper’s website on Thursday, the editorial staff said the new editor had undermined trust by massaging headlines about the Russian state energy company Rosneft and blocking a recent column critical of the same company and its boss, Igor Sechin.

The editorial, titled “The New Vedomosti”, was published without the editor’s consent, a staff member confirmed, adding that it wasn’t expected to stay online for long.

“Having been deprived of its reputation, Vedomosti will become just another dependent and controlled media outlet whose task won’t be fulfilling the needs of its readers with verified news and high-quality analysis, but fulfilling the interests and ambitions of its official and unnamed owners,” the newspaper’s staff wrote. They said they intended to “defend the values” on which the newspaper was founded.

The journalists called for the new editor, Andrey Shmarov, to be replaced. Shmarov has been approached for comment.

In remarks to the state news agency RIA Novosti, Shmarov confirmed that he was changing the newspaper’s editorial policies but had not introduced censorship. “If I had violated this ban [on censorship], they could take me to court,” he said. “And nobody has filed suit against me.”

Shmarov’s remarks did not address concrete claims about the website content that he had edited. He added that the appearance of the opinion article “bears witness to the freedom of expression in this publication”.

It is possible that some staff will resign in protest. “Many [of us] are talking about quitting,” one journalist at the paper told the Guardian.

Vedomosti, founded in 1999 in a partnership that included the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, is one of Russia’s most storied business newspapers. The newspaper has changed hands several times since Russia imposed new laws in 2014 that limited foreign control of media. In March it was announced that Vedomosti had been sold again, to the owner of an investment firm and editor-in-chief of Argumenty i Fakty, a weekly newspaper owned by the Moscow government.

The new owners installed Shmarov, who newspaper staff allege personally intervened to change the headline of an article about Sechin and remove a column by Konstantin Sonin, an economist, that criticised Sechin.

In the opinion article, the newspaper staff said the alleged actions “contradicted the publicly stated values and principles of the publication”.

On Wednesday, Ksenia Boletskaya, the newspaper’s media editor, wrote that Shmarov had banned the publication of polls by the independent pollster Levada because the Kremlin had opposed them, and that Shmarov had blocked reporters from criticising Putin’s plans to use constitutional amendments to “zero out” his presidential terms, potentially allowing him to hold power until 2036. “For failing to follow the bans, you’ll be fired,” Boletskaya wrote.

A number of independent outlets claim they have been censored by owners with pro-government views. In 2014, staff at the news website Lenta.ru complained of censorship and quit en masse after the site’s editor was dismissed.

In 2016, a newly installed manager of RBC, another business news site, which had written about controversial topics including Putin’s children, told reporters there were “solid double lines” that the reporters had to be careful not to cross. Asked what those were, the manager replied: “Unfortunately, nobody knows where the solid double line is.”

The Vedomosti journalist said reporters were shocked by the sudden sale and then tightening of control over stories. “You can’t exaggerate the amount of damage done [to Vedomosti] in the last month,” they said. “They’re destroying it from the inside.”