A journalist with the Wall Street Journal -- Evan Gershkovich -- has been arrested in Russia on suspicion of espionage, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) says.
An FSB statement said: “The illegal activities of the correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, US citizen Evan Gershkovich, born in 1991, accredited at the Russian Foreign Ministry, suspected of espionage in the interests of the American government, have been suppressed.”
State news agency TASS reported he was detained in Yekaterinburg, on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains.
The FSB statement said Gershkovich was detained “while trying to obtain secret information” relating to “the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
According to Gershkovich’s bio page on the Wall Street Journal’s website, he covers Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. He previously worked for news agency Agence France-Presse, the Moscow Times and the New York Times.
The arrest comes amid a crackdown in Russia on independent journalists and foreign news outlets in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
In March 2022, Russia's President Vladimir Putin signed a censorship bill into law making it impossible for news organizations to accurately report the news in or from Russia.
The law, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes it a crime to disseminate “fake” information about the invasion of Ukraine, with a penalty of up to 15 years in prison for anyone convicted.
In the wake of the law passing, several major international news outlets including CNN, the BBC and CBS News, announced they would initially suspend reporting in Russia.
Western publications and social media sites have been blocked online, forcing Russians seeking alternatives to the official propaganda to go underground using virtual private networks, or VPNs, which allow people to browse the internet freely by encrypting their internet traffic.
Data from Sensortower, an apps market research company, show the top eight VPN apps in Russia were downloaded almost 80 million times in Russia this year, despite the government’s efforts against their use.
