Nearly a year ago, Russian authorities detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges while he was on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg.
Gershkovich, whom the U.S. State Department has designated as wrongfully detained, was accredited by Russian authorities to work as a journalist in the country.
His detention came as chilling news to onlookers around the world, given that Gershkovich was the first American to be arrested in Russia on spying charges since the Cold War.
The Journal and the U.S. have forcefully pushed back against the accusations, urging Moscow to immediately release him. But this hasn’t happened — at least so far.
In February, a Russian court denied Gershkovich’s appeal, ruling that he must stay behind bars until at least the end of March.
“It has been extraordinarily difficult to watch these proceedings play out, each one an indefensible attempt to portray Evan as something other than what he is — a journalist,” Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour and WSJ Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker said in a statement following the decision.
Moscow City Court via Associated Press
But Gershkovich is not the only American journalist apparently targeted by Russia.
A Russian court in February extended the pretrial detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, an American-Russian journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. Congress.
Kurmasheva, who lives in Prague, was arrested at a Russian airport on Oct. 18, 2023, while she was preparing to return home from a visit to her sick mother. She was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, and accused of disseminating “false information” about the Russian military.
Human rights groups have denounced Kurmasheva’s arrest, and RFE/RL President Stephen Capus said she has been unfairly targeted because she is a U.S. journalist.
Paul Beckett, an assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, described the incarcerations of Gershkovich and Kurmasheva as “frontal attacks on press freedom.”
Beckett said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s practice of detaining Americans is a “transactional exercise” to gain leverage over the U.S. When it comes to specifically putting reporters behind bars, Beckett said, Putin gets an additional advantage “because it has such a chilling effect on the flow of information and trustworthy information out of Russia.”