Wall Street Journal pulls Russia bureau chief

The Wall Street Journal pulled its Moscow bureau chief out of Russia Friday, a day after one of its correspondents was arrested on spying charges and taken into custody.

Evan Gershkovich, 31, was detained in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains about 900 miles east of Moscow, while on a reporting trip Thursday.

Gershkovich has not been granted access to the lawyer hired by the Journal, the newspaper reported Saturday.

He is being held at the Federal Security Service’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where Paul Whelan, a former US marine was initially jailed.

Whelan is serving a 16-year sentence on spying charges.

Diplomats and Russia experts see “little hope” of a speedy release for the reporter, as espionage trials take place in secret, the Journal reported.

Nearly all Western journalists have pulled out of Russia after the country’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

The exodus has now been accelerated by Gershkovich’s arrest, according to the newspaper.

The son of Russian Jews who fled the Soviet Union for the US, Gershkovich returned to the country to report for the Moscow Times and the AFP after a stint at the New York Times, before being hired by the Wall Street Journal to cover the country in 2022.

“He spent his weekends chatting about music, politics, and the news in the banya or sauna and was always ready to help competing journalists,” the newspaper reported Saturday.

“Evan would talk about … what it means to be covering Russia rather than Ukraine,” a Financial Times colleague told the Journal. “It’s a very difficult thing to get your head around, and where you sit in relation to that in terms of your own identity.”

A graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, Gershkovich grew up in New Jersey where he was a stellar student and soccer player.

A dogged reporter who has won awards for his work, he spent time with doctors during the COVID pandemic at Russian hospitals and once slept for four days in the woods to document forest fires as they swept through a remote Siberian region.

“I just want to get the story right,” he said, according to the Journal profile.

Gershkovich’s arrest and incarceration were widely condemned. President Biden demanded Friday that Russia release Gershokovich.

“Let him go,” Biden told reporters when asked if he had a message to Moscow about Gershkovich, before adding vaguely that “we’re in the process” of trying to work out his release.

“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the Journal said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”