Russian Federal Security Service investigators have formally charged Evan Gershkovich with espionage but the Wall Street Journal reporter denied the charges and said he was working as a journalist, Russian news agencies reported on Friday.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said on 30 March that it had detained Gershkovich in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and had opened an espionage case against the 31-year-old for collecting what it said were state secrets about the military-industrial complex.
“Gershkovich has been charged,” Interfax quoted a source as saying on Friday.
Tass reported that FSB investigators had formally charged Gershkovich with carrying out espionage in the interests of the United States, but that Gershkovich had denied the charge.
“He categorically denied all the accusations and stated that he was engaged in journalistic activities in Russia,” Tass citied an unidentified source as saying.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the cold war.
News of the charges came as the top two leaders of the US Senate issued a rare bipartisan statement demanding the release of Gershkovich and declaring that “journalism is not a crime”.
“We strongly condemn the wrongful detention of US citizen and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and demand the immediate release of this internationally known and respected independent journalist,” wrote the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.
They said Gershkovich was accredited by the Russian ministry of foreign affairs to work as a journalist in Russia and “Russian authorities have failed to present any credible evidence to justify their fabricated charges.”
Schumer and McConnell wrote: “Let there be no mistake: journalism is not a crime.”
In a statement on Friday, the Journal said: “We’ve seen media reports indicating Evan has been charged. As we’ve said from the beginning, these charges are categorically false and unjustified, and we continue to demand Evan’s immediate release.”
The newspaper has described Gershkovich’s arrest as “a vicious affront to a free press, and should spur outrage in all free people and governments throughout the world”.
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The Kremlin said that Gershkovich had been carrying out espionage “under the cover” of journalism. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has told the United States that Gershkovich was caught red-handed while trying to obtain secrets.
President Vladimir Putin has yet to comment publicly on the case.
A fluent Russian speaker born to Soviet émigrés and raised in New Jersey, Gershkovich moved to Moscow in late 2017 to join the English-language Moscow Times, and subsequently worked for the French national news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Russia announced the start of its “special military operation” in February 2022, just as Gershkovich was in London, about to return to Russia to join the Journal’s Moscow bureau.
It was decided that he would live in London but travel to Russia frequently for reporting trips, as a correspondent accredited with the foreign ministry.
