The security services said Russian On Thursday, the American Wall Street Journal reporter, Ivan Gershkovitch, was arrested on charges of “espionage.”
A statement from the Federal Security Service, carried by Russian agencies, included that it had “thwarted the illegal activity of the accredited correspondent (…) of the Moscow bureau of the American Wall Street Journal, American citizen Ivan Gershkovitch.”
The security apparatus stated that it is suspected of “spying” the journalist “on behalf of Washington” and collecting information regarding a “company affiliated with the Russian military-industrial complex”.
Before starting his work in the American daily newspaper in 2022, Gershkovitch was a correspondent for the French News Agency in Moscow, and before that a journalist for the English-language newspaper “Moscow Times”.
The journalist is of Russian origin and is fluent in the Russian language, at the age of 31, and his parents reside in the United States.
France 24/AFP
