US President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden personally met with the parents of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia on charges of espionage. This was reported by The Washington Post.
The meeting took place yesterday at the Washington Hilton Hotel before the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. What exactly the president and the journalist's parents were talking about is not specified.
The dinner was attended by well-known American personalities — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liev Schreiber, Jay Smith-Cameron — and Yulia Navalnaya with her daughter Daria and basketball player Britney Griner, who returned to the United States after being exchanged for Russian Viktor Bout, who was serving a sentence in an American prison. Among them was also the mother of journalist Austin Tice, who was detained more than 10 years ago in Syria.
During the event, Biden spoke out in support of American correspondents under investigation in other countries. “Journalism is not a crime. Evan and Austin are to be released immediately, along with all other Americans detained abroad. <…> I promise you, I work like hell to bring them home,” said the President of the United States.
The detention of Gershkovich in Yekaterinburg became known on March 30, he was sent to the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center in the capital. The journalist is suspected of collecting information about one of the enterprises of the military-industrial complex (Article 276 of the Criminal Code). Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, suggested that the potential opportunity to exchange him for prisoners from Russia convicted in other countries could be the reason for Gershkovich's detention.
The US State Department assigned Gershkovich the status of «wrongly detained.» US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Joe Biden asked for the journalist's release. Bloomberg wrote that Vladimir Putin personally approved the arrest of a Wall Street Journal correspondent at the initiative of high-ranking security officials.