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After more than a year in prison, U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich has been indicted in Russia on charges of stealing “secret information.”
From Reuters. Russian prosecutors said on Thursday they had sent the case of detained U.S. reporter Evan Gershkovich to court after concluding he had been collecting information for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency about a Russian tank factory.
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Gershkovich, 32, was arrested on March 29, 2023, in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on charges of espionage that carry up to 20 years in prison after the FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB, said it had caught him “red-handed” trying to obtain military secrets.
He denies any wrongdoing and his employer, the Wall Street Journal, said in a statement on Thursday after the latest Russian move that he was facing “a false and baseless charge” based on what it called “calculated and transparent lies.” President Joe Biden has called his detention “totally illegal”. …
“The investigation has established and confirmed with documentary evidence that Gershkovich, an American journalist for The Wall Street Journal, on the instructions of the CIA, collected secret information in the Sverdlovsk region in March 2023 about the activities of the defence plant NPK Uralvagonzavod JSC on the production and repair of military equipment,” the prosecutors’ statement said. …
Prosecutors did not release any documentary evidence to back the charge.
PRE-TRIAL DETENTION
A joint statement from Almar Latour, his newspaper’s publisher, and its editor in chief, Emma Tucker, demanded Gershkovich’s immediate release. …
“Evan has spent 441 days wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for simply doing his job. Evan is a journalist. The Russian regime’s smearing of Evan is repugnant, disgusting and based on calculated and transparent lies.” [they said] …
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(Excerpt from Reuters. Photo Credit: N-sky/Getty Images via Canva Pro)