The Russian Justice Department sentenced this Friday (19) the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, correspondent for the newspaper Wall Street Journalto 16 years in prison.
He was charged with espionage for allegedly collecting secret information about the Russian military industry.
At the time of the arrest, Russian authorities claimed that Gershkovich “collected on behalf of the US side secret information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
The 32-year-old American reporter worked for the Wall Street Journal since January 2022 and had been a correspondent in Russia since 2017. “He first worked for the Moscow Times and then for Agence France-Presse,” the newspaper said. Previously, he was a news assistant for the New York Times.
Gershkovich, who was arrested in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Urals, is the first American reporter to be prosecuted for espionage since the Cold War.
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