Russia arrests Wall Street Journal reporter on suspicion of spying for Washington

Russia's top security service has arrested an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal on suspicion of spying for Washington, the Associated Press reported on Thursday. This is the first time a US correspondent has been arrested on spying accusations since the Cold War, the report said.  

The Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's top intelligence agency and successor of the Soviet-era KGB, said that it had opened a criminal case for suspected espionage against Evan Gershkovich, a US national who has been working for WSJ since January 2022.

The Russian agency has accused the reporter of gathering information classified as a state secret about a military factory. While the agency did not share any detail about the factory, it said it had arrested him in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg as he was trying to procure secret information.

The FSB said that it had been established that "Gershkovich, acting on an assignment from the American side, was gathering information classified as a state secret about the activity of one of the enterprises of Russia's military-industrial complex".

However, WSJ has denied all the charges against its reporter and sought an immediate release of Gershkovich. "The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich," the WSJ said in a statement.

The Journal said Gershkovich reports on Russia as part of the Journal’s Moscow bureau.

Foreign journalists covering Russia backed Gershkovich online, saying he was a professional journalist, not a spy. Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert in Russia's security agencies, wrote on Twitter: "Evan Gershkovich is a very good and brave journalist, not a spy, for Christ's sake. It (his detention) is a frontal attack on all foreign correspondents who still work in Russia. And it means that the FSB is off the leash."

Russia's Kommersant newspaper reported that Gershkovich would be transported to Moscow and held in the capital's Lefortovo prison, an FSB pre-trial detention facility, according to Reuters.

A Princeton fellow, Gershkovich has covered Russia since 2017. Before joining WSJ, he previously worked at The Moscow Times newspaper for three years from 2017 and 2020, and then at France's Agence-France Presse news agency from November 2020 to January 2022. In January 2022, he joined WSJ, according to his LinkedIn profile.  

Reuters said in recent months, he had primarily covered Russian politics and the war in Ukraine. His mobile phone could not be reached on Thursday and, according to the Telegram messenger service, he was last online on Wednesday at 1:28 p.m. Moscow time, the report said.

(With inputs from agencies)