A Moscow court on March 30 authorized the detention of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal for two months on suspicion of espionage. The Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed he had been seeking information about Russia’s military-industrial complex at the behest of the U.S. government -- accusations The Wall Street Journal and the United States firmly rejected.

Under President Vladimir Putin, a few Western journalists have been expelled or denied renewal of their credentials, but none has faced criminal prosecution. Gershkovich has not been formally charged, but his arrest is unprecedented for a foreign journalist in post-Soviet Russia and a highly provocative move that harkens back to the Cold War period.

No Apologies

Relations between Russia and the West have been on a downward trajectory for years and have been particularly strained since Moscow’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the detention of a U.S. journalist on accusations of spying broke new ground. It was the first such case in Russia’s post-Soviet history, prompting comparisons with the 1986 arrest of journalist Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report.

Daniloff was released after 15 days of intense negotiations and exchanged for a Russian arrested in the United States on espionage charges.

“Of course, all this was made up by the KGB, and I knew from the first interrogation that it was a retaliatory measure following the arrest of a Soviet spy in New York, [Gennady] Zakharov,” Daniloff 

In 1992, Daniloff had a chance to ask former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about his arrest.

“Gorbachev answered that it was in accordance with the rules of the Cold War, a retaliatory measure in reaction to the arrest of Zakharov in New York,” Daniloff said. “He just said it was a normal Cold War matter. He didn’t apologize.”

In August 2021, BBC Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford was expelled from Russia as Moscow’s response to British restrictions on Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik.

“The expulsion of Sarah Rainsford is our symmetrical response,” state-run TV channel Rossia-24 commented, calling it a “landmark deportation.”

'Continuing This Work'?

Although American journalists have not been targeted with criminal charges under Putin, other Americans have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Western governments and others have accused Putin’s government of taking “hostages” to secure the release of Russians held abroad.

British Russia analyst Mark Galeotti wrote on Twitter that the Gershkovich arrest “is a shocking example of the way that these days the Kremlin doesn’t even feel the need to have the most basic pretext to use hostage-taking as a tool of statecraft.”

“It is entirely possible he was detained for an exchange,” said Russian human rights lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov, noting that such exchanges usually only take place after a trial and conviction in Russia and on the basis of a presidential pardon.

“They make a political decision and then the legal procedures are arranged around it,” he said. [ RFE/JS ]