Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained a Wall Street Journal reporter, accusing him of espionage on behalf of the United States.
The FSB, the top domestic security and counterintelligence agency that succeeded the Soviet-era KGB, said on March 29 that it had detained Evan Gershkovich, a Moscow-based correspondent, in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, roughly 900 miles east of Moscow.
Gershkovich, 31, is accredited to work as a journalist in Russia by the country’s foreign ministry, the FSB said.
The security service said in a statement translated by state-run TASS that it had “thwarted the illegal activities of Evan Gershkovich, a US citizen born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, who is suspected of spying in the interests of the American government.”…