For the first time since the cold war, Moscow has accused a US journalist of espionage. Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, was arrested in Yekaterinburg on March 29 by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The reporter, a Russia specialist, insists he was there to report on the Wagner Group, a mercenary organisation that fights for Russia in Ukraine. But the FSB has charged him with spying on “one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex”.
Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal vehemently rejects the allegations. On April 11 the US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, announced that Gershkovich has been “wrongfully detained” and called for his immediate release, condemning Russia’s “ongoing war against truth”.
Sitting in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, Gershkovich will find scant comfort in the notion that he is merely the latest in a long history of journalists harassed, detained or expelled in wartime. The familiar assertion that truth is the first casualty of war tells only half the story. Journalists who seek to tell it are often victims too.
