Gospozha Zakharova complains about a time honored practice of every political entity since the dawn of time.
[Regnum] American intelligence services use journalists as agents, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on the Telegram channel on April 5.
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A year after the arrest of Evan Gershkovich, an employee of the American edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the March issues of the newspaper came out with a black and white photo of an American journalist detained on suspicion of espionage with the phrase “His report could be here.” To this, Zakharova said that Gershkovich could write about terrorist attacks on Russian cities and fellow journalists killed by the Kyiv regime.
“I could if I was engaged in journalism and not espionage,” the diplomat emphasized.
Zakharova also drew attention to the fact that not a single American newspaper came out in support of another American journalist, Gonzalo Lira, who spent eight months in torture in a Ukrainian prison, eventually being killed in January. At the same time, the diplomat said that she had not heard about the initiation of a criminal case in the United States regarding the murder of Lira.
As Regnum reported, Gershkovich was detained in Yekaterinburg in March 2023. A criminal case was opened against him under the article on espionage (Article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). A WSJ journalist collected secret information in Russia about one of the enterprises of the military-industrial complex. The information that the accused tried to find out was a state secret.
On March 26, 2024, the Lefortovo Court of Moscow extended Gershkovich’s arrest until June 30. Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said on March 28 that there are contacts between Russia and the United States on the exchange of prisoners, but they must be carried out in silence.
President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, did not rule out the possibility of exchanging Gershkovich. The head of state said that Russia has already made so many goodwill gestures that it has exhausted all limits.