Russia’s FSB security service said on Thursday that a reporter with the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich, had been detained in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on suspicion of espionage, the Interfax news agency reported.
In a statement quoted by Interfax, the FSB said it had “stopped the illegal activities of US citizen Gershkovich Evan, born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, accredited at the Russian Foreign Ministry, who is suspected of spying in the interests of the American government”.
No comment was immediately available from the newspaper.
The statement said Gershkovich had been tasked “by the American side” with gathering information on “the activities of one of the enterprises of the military-defence complex”. It provided no evidence.
Gershkovich is the first reporter for an American news outlet to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War. His arrest comes amid the bitter tensions between Moscow and Washington over the fighting in Ukraine.
Gershkovich’s last report from Moscow, published earlier this week, focused on the Russian economy’s slowdown amid Western sanctions imposed when Russian troops entered Ukraine last year.
Before joining The Wall Street Journal, 31-year-old Gershkovich worked for Agence France-Presse in Moscow.
He was previously a reporter for The Moscow Times, an English-language news website.
Gershkovich speaks Russian. His parents live in the United States but are originally from the Soviet Union.
Mr. Gershkovich reports on Russia as part of the Journal’s Moscow bureau. He is accredited to work as a journalist in Russia by the country’s foreign ministry, the FSB said.
The FSB said it had “stopped the illegal activities” Mr. Gershkovich was conducting and that an espionage case had been opened against him in Yekaterinburg.
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