US journalist arrested in Moscow meets his lawyers for first time

The Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia on spying charges has met his lawyers for the first time since his arrest last week, according to the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.

Evan Gershkovich, 31, was arrested on Thursday in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city. He is the first US correspondent since the cold war to be detained on espionage accusations. The Journal has denied the charges.

“Evan’s health is good, and he is grateful for the outpouring of support from around the world. We continue to call for his immediate release,” the Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, said in a note to the newsroom Tuesday. She said the paper was encouraged by the visit.

Gershkowich’s family, she said, “are relieved to know we finally have contact with Evan”.

The reporter is being kept behind bars for two months pending an investigation. Moscow’s Lefortovsky district court said on Monday that it had received an appeal against Gershkovich’s arrest filed by his defence, according to Russian news agencies. No date for a hearing on the appeal has been set.

Gershkovich is in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. A Russian state prison monitor said late on Monday that Gershkovich was in a quarantine cell while undergoing medical checks, and had access to a TV, radio and refrigerator. The monitor, Alexei Melnikov, said Gershkovich had been able to use the library at the detention facility and was reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the top successor to the Soviet-era KGB, accused Gershkovich of trying to obtain classified information about a Russian arms factory.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday that the Biden administration was pressing hard for Gershkovich’s release. “It’s got attention all the way up to the Oval Office in terms of how we can get him home,” Kirby told reporters in Washington.

The US Secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urged his Russian counterpart Sunday – during a phone call between the diplomats, rare since the start of the Ukraine war – to release Gershkovich immediately, as well as another imprisoned American, Paul Whelan.