Wall Street Journal journalist and US citizen Evan Gershkovich has been charged with espionage (Article 276 of the Criminal Code), the Prosecutor General's Office reported.
The materials against Gershkovich were sent to the Sverdlovsk Regional Court for consideration on the merits. According to the FSB, the journalist, «on instructions from the CIA,» was collecting information about the activities of the Uralvagonzavod defense enterprise, which produces and repairs military equipment.
The criminal prosecution of Gershkovich became known at the end of March 2023, when the journalist was detained in Yekaterinburg. The next day, he was transferred to Moscow, where the court chose a preventive measure in the form of detention in a pretrial detention center. Later, the arrest was extended several times, and the journalist himself was held in the Lefortovo detention center.
Shortly before his arrest, Gershkovich visited Nizhny Tagil, where Uralvagonzavod is located. In addition, as Vyacheslav Wegner, a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Sverdlovsk Region, said, the reporter asked him about the attitude of Russians to the Wagner PMC and the work of military enterprises.
The US State Department assigned Gershkovich the status of «wrongfully detained». US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and US President Joe Biden called for his release. Bloomberg wrote that Vladimir Putin personally approved Gershkovich's arrest on the initiative of high-ranking security officials.
In December 2023, the US authorities announced that Russia had rejected the offer to release Evan Gershkovich. Along with the journalist, Russia was asked to release US Marine Paul Whelan, also convicted in the espionage case.