In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the security services routinely torment domestic reporters who dare to expose the truth and now it has extended to the foreign press, arresting Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index ranks the country 155th of 180 nations, declaring that “the government has taken complete control of news and information by establishing extensive wartime censorship, blocking the media, and pursuing non-compliant journalists, forcing many of them into exile.” The Committee to Protect Journalists details 82 journalists and media workers killed in Russia since 1992. Since the war in Ukraine, the state has tightened the noose, repeatedly imprisoning reporters for revealing the truth about the brutality of the campaign. A March 2022 law criminalized the spread of information deemed to be false by the state.
Tuesday, a Russian court convicted a single father over social media posts critical of the war, sentencing him to two years in prison. The case was brought against him after his 13-year-old daughter drew an anti-war picture in school. She has been sent to an orphanage.
In this context, it is hard to imagine any escalation of Putin’s war against free expression — but escalation is precisely what Moscow delivered in grabbing Gershkovich. He is the first American journalist to be detained in an espionage case since the Cold War, and he could be jailed for 20 years if convicted.
The FSB — the new name of the KGB — accuses Gershkovich of attempting to obtain classified information, saying he “was acting on instructions from the American side to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.” The “instructions from the American side” claim is a pure propagandistic lie. Good reporters report.
When an American reporter is imprisoned, American values are attacked. There must be hell to pay. The Biden administration and the rest of the free world must use every bit of leverage they have to free Evan Gershkovich.