Friday commemorated the somber one-year anniversary of the incident in which masked Russian officers apprehended Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg while he was awaiting his meal during a reporting assignment.
On this anniversary, Joe Biden stated that the US remains committed to securing the release of Evan Gershkovich, the 32-year-old Wall Street journalist, who has been detained in Russia on espionage charges, a claim vehemently denied by both Gershkovich and the US government.
“Journalism is not a crime, and Evan went to Russia to do his job as a reporter – risking his safety to shine the light of truth on Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine,” Biden said in a statement on Friday.
Gershkovich was apprehended during a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg, situated in the Ural Mountains. This incident marked the first instance of an American journalist being detained in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War era.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal, a New York-based financial and news publication owned by Murdoch, showcased a striking front page.
The publication posted an image on X, previously known as Twitter, which depicted a significant blank space beneath the headline “His story should be here.”
Next to the stark space are articles about what the reporter has lost in the last year and a piece titled “Authoritarians Threaten Journalists Around Globe”.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) asserts that Gershkovich was acting under US directives to gather state secrets. However, they have not presented any evidence to substantiate this claim, which Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal, and the US government all refute. Washington has labeled his detention as unjust, and US officials are actively involved in various efforts to secure his release.
Since his arrest, Gershkovich, a 32-year-old journalist for The Wall Street Journal, has been deprived of freedom. He has been confined to the notorious Lefortovo prison on the outskirts of Moscow, where the Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was once held. Despite the lack of evidence supporting the espionage charges against him, Gershkovich finds himself in this situation. Nevertheless, a Moscow court recently conducted a closed hearing and granted the FSB permission to detain him for another three months.
