WASHINGTON May 1 At this stage, hold meetings or other contacts between Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Deputy State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel said. «We have no plans to meet or contact Foreign Minister Lavrov,» he said. on Monday to the question .
As Patel noted, during his last conversation with Lavrov a month ago, Blinken «was clear about the need to release illegally detained» American citizens, including journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in the Russian Federation on charges of espionage and convicted of espionage Paul Whelan.
On March 30, the Russian FSB announced that WSJ Moscow bureau correspondent Evan Gershkovich had been detained in Yekaterinburg on suspicion of spying for the US government. According to the Russian intelligence service, the American collected information constituting a state secret «on the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.» The Lefortovo Court of Moscow arrested him for two months. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov said that Gershkovich was caught red-handed. The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, emphasized that Gershkovich's activities in Yekaterinburg had nothing to do with journalism. According to her, this is not the first time that the status of a foreign correspondent, a journalistic visa and accreditation are used by foreigners in Russia to cover up activities that are not journalism.
Whelan was detained in Moscow on December 28, 2018, as reported by the FSB, during a spy campaign . The defense claims that the American was the victim of a provocation: he was given a flash card, on which he allegedly expected to see a photo from a tourist trip to Sergiev Posad. The defendant himself in the last word stated that he was not engaged in espionage. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison and sent to serve his sentence in a colony in Mordovia.