Last Updated on April 2, 2023
The Wall Street Journal reporter who was recently arrested in Russia for espionage sought classified information from a Russian government official in the period of time leading up to his arrest.
American-born Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union due to rumors that Jewish citizens would be exiled to Siberia, formerly worked for The New York Times and The Moscow Times. He was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on March 29th, prompting a massive outcry from American corporate media publications, which have accused Russia of waging war on the free press.
Despite the narrative being presented to the American People and the wider NATO world, Gershkovich wasn’t arrested for merely reporting the news, but for attempting to gain classified information regarding “military enterprises” from a Russian government official – something that Russia claims he was doing on behalf of the US government.
According to a Russian legislator who Gerschkovich was trying to extract information from under the guise of conducting an interview, the Wall Street Journal reporter was looking for details on the “military-industrial complex of Yekaterinburg,” and was even trying to gain information on the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company that’s conducting military operations in Ukraine, perhaps most notably in the besieged Donbass city of Bakhmut.
“What the employee of the American publication The Wall Street Journal was doing in Yekaterinburg had nothing to do with journalism,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote in a statement defending the arrest that was published on her Telegram channel.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the status of a ‘foreign correspondent’, a journalist visa, and accreditation have been used by foreign nationals in our country to cover up activities that are not journalism. This is not the first famous Western individual who has been caught red-handed,” Zakharova explained.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) echoed Zakharova’s claims in a public statement of its own, reporting that an investigation had “established that Gershkovich, acting as an agent for the American side, collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
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Though American press outlets are up in arms over the arrest of Evan Gershkovich, the same outlets have been silent over the war on the press being waged in Ukraine.
In addition to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy shutting down independent media, the Ukrainian government has compiled a “kill list” that includes American and Western reporters. Several individuals listed on the “kill list” have been “liquidated” by Ukrainian forces, including Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian nationalist philosopher and Putin ally Aleksandr Dugin.
As National File recently reported, also added to the “kill list” was Keir Simmons, an NBC News reporter who ran afoul of Zelensky’s NATO-backed regime when he took a trip to Crimea to report on the attitudes of local residents and found that they wholeheartedly support Vladimir Putin and the Russian war effort, with Crimeans going as far as to say that if Ukraine attempts an invasion of the region, they will take up arms.
