A Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, was arrested in Yekaterinburg, Russia last Wednesday, March 29, for seeking classified information regarding Russian “state secret[s]” from a government official, according to a report from TASS.
Gershkovich, who formerly worked for The New York Times and The Moscow Times, was allegedly trying to obtain information on the “military-industrial complex of Yekaterinburg” and the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company involved in military operations in Ukraine.
Russia claims that Gershkovich was acting on behalf of the U.S. government and that his actions had nothing to do with journalism.
“What the employee of the American publication The Wall Street Journal was doing in Yekaterinburg had nothing to do with journalism,” said Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed that Gershkovich was “acting at the behest of the American side” and had “collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of an enterprise within Russia’s military-industrial complex.”
While Gershkovich’s arrest has prompted a response from American corporate media publications, accusing Russia of attacking the free press, Russia itself claims that the journalist was not arrested for reporting the news but for attempting to gain classified information.
