The American journalist detained in Russia on spying allegations may have been attempting to report on the Wagner mercenary group and speak to employees at one of the country’s largest tank production facilities, a Russian reporter familiar with his plans told NBC News on Friday.
Evan Gershkovich, 31, understood that his assignment for The Wall Street Journal in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg could attract the attention of Russia’s Federal Security Service — the domestic intelligence service that succeeded the Soviet-era KGB — said Dmitry Kolezev, an independent Russian journalist.
Kolezev added that he had warned Gershkovich that agents from the spy agency would follow him, but the American knew this was par for the course for foreign journalists operating on Russian soil.
“He said that he understands this very well, and he had the same kind of chase when he was traveling to Perm,” Kolezev said, referring to one of Gershkovich’s previous reporting trips to another Russian city.
He added that Gershkovich, who was based in the U.K. but would travel to Russia for two to three week on assignments, had “sounded pretty sure that they wouldn’t touch him because he was an American journalist working for a famous newspaper.”
His confidence appears to have been misplaced, because on Tuesday he was arrested in Yekaterinburg on suspicion of “espionage in the interests of the American government,” the FSB said in a statement that went on to accuse him of collecting “information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
The FSB provided no evidence or further details on when Gershkovich was detained. He was later taken to the Lefortovo court in Moscow and formally arrested. The court quickly ordered that Gershkovich be detained until May 29, according to the official Telegram channel of the capital’s courts.
He denied the charges, Russia’s state news…
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