Russia Escalates Its War on Reporters
Updated at 2:35 p.m. ET on April 4, 2023
I found it hard to get to sleep on Thursday night after seeing news that a Moscow court had charged the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. The images from outside the court shocked many of us. The Moscow press pack is a tight-knit community, and Gershkovich’s colleagues from the BBC, the Financial Times, , and other publications posted “Journalism is not a crime” on their social media. As a journalist who has covered Russia for most of my career and worked closely with many foreign reporters, I count myself among Evan’s friends. The spying charges—a ludicrous pretext for what is, in effect, hostage-taking by the Russian state—threaten the 31-year-old reporter with a possible sentence of 20 years in prison.
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