Russia arrests Wall Street Journal reporter on suspicion of espionage
Russia’s top security agency has arrested an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal on suspicion of espionage, the first time a U.S. correspondent has been put behind bars on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations and demanded his release.
Evan Gershkovich, 31, was detained in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, about 1,035 miles east of Moscow. Russia’s Federal Security Service accused him of trying to obtain classified information.
The service, known as the FSB, is the top domestic security agency and main successor to the Soviet-era KGB. It alleged that Gershkovich “was acting on instructions from the American side to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.”
The Journal “vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the newspaper said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”
The arrest comes at a moment of bitter tensions between the West and Moscow over its war in Ukraine and as the Kremlin intensifies a crackdown on opposition activists, independent journalists and civil society groups.
The sweeping campaign of repression is unprecedented since the Soviet era. Activists say it often means the very profession of journalism is criminalized, along with the activities of ordinary Russians who oppose the war.
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Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be arrested on espionage allegations in Russia since September 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. He was released without charges 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet Union’s United Nations mission who was arrested by the FBI, also on spying charges.
At a hearing Thursday, a Moscow court quickly ruled to keep Gershkovich behind bars pending the investigation.
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In Washington, the Biden administration said it had spoken with the Journal and Gershkovich’s family. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the arrest “in the strongest terms” and urged Americans to heed government warnings not to travel to Russia.
The State Department was in direct touch with the Russian government and seeking access to Gershkovich, Jean-Pierre said. The administration has no “specific indication” that journalists in Russia are being targeted, she said.
Gershkovich, who covers Russia, Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations as a correspondent in the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau, could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of espionage. Prominent lawyers noted that past investigations into espionage cases took a year to 18 months; during the investigation, Gershkovich can be held with little contact with the outside world.
The FSB noted that he had accreditation from the Russian Foreign Ministry to work as a journalist, but Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Gershkovich was using his journalistic credentials as a cover for “activities that have nothing to do with journalism.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “It is not about a suspicion; it is about the fact that he was caught red-handed.”
Gershkovich speaks fluent Russian and had worked for the French agency Agence France-Presse and the New York Times. He was a 2014 graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was a philosophy major who cooperated with local papers and championed a free press, said Clayton Rose, the college’s president.
His last report from Moscow, published this week, focused on the Russian economy’s slowdown amid Western sanctions imposed when Russian troops entered Ukraine last year.
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Ivan Pavlov, a prominent Russian defense attorney who has worked on many espionage and treason cases, said Gershkovich is the first criminal case of espionage lodged against a foreign journalist in post-Soviet Russia.
“That unwritten rule not to touch accredited foreign journalists has stopped working,” said Pavlov, a member of the First Department legal aid group.
Pavlov said the case against Gershkovich was built in order for Russia to have “trump cards” for a future prisoner exchange and would likely be resolved “not by the means of the law, but by political, diplomatic means.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov ruled out any quick swap.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is warning that his nation must win a drawn-out battle in a key eastern city, lest Russia sense weakness.
“I wouldn’t even consider this issue now because people who were previously swapped had already served their sentences,” Ryabkov said, according to Russian news agencies.
Gershkovich’s arrest follows a swap in December in which WNBA star Brittney Griner was freed after 10 months behind bars in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Another American, Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive, has been imprisoned in Russia since December 2018 on espionage allegations that his family and the U.S. government have said are baseless.
“Our family is sorry to hear that another American family will have to experience the same trauma that we have had to endure for the past 1,553 days,” Whelan’s brother David said in an emailed statement. “It sounds as though the frame-up of Mr. Gershkovich was the same as it was in Paul’s case.”
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Jeanne Cavelier, head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said Gershkovich‘s arrest “looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States.”
“We are very alarmed because it is probably a way to intimidate all Western journalists that are trying to investigate aspects of the war on the ground in Russia,” Cavelier told the Associated Press.
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Another prominent lawyer with the First Department group, Yevgeny Smirnov, said that those arrested on espionage and treason charges are usually held at the FSB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where they are usually held in total isolation, without phone calls, visitors or even access to newspapers. At most, they can receive letters, often delayed by weeks. Smirnov called these conditions “tools of suppression.”
Smirnov and Pavlov both said that any trial would be held behind closed doors. According to Pavlov, there have been no acquittals in treason and espionage cases in Russia since 1999.
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