CNN
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Detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has filed an attraction against his arrest in Russia, the Russian state information company TASS reported Monday.
The company cited the press service of the Lefortovo Court of Moscow, which took the American journalist into custody final week.
Gershkovich is at present being held in a pre-trial detention middle on the infamous Lefortovo jail till May 29. He faces as much as 20 years in jail on espionage expenses. The Wall Street Journal has vehemently denied the spying accusations against Gershkovich.
No date for listening to the attraction has been set.
Gershkovich’s arrest final week – the primary detention of an American reporter in Russia on allegations of spying because the Cold War – highlighted the Kremlin’s clampdown on media freedoms and the operations of overseas information shops since Moscow invaded Ukraine final yr.
It additionally sharpened relations between Moscow and the United States. US President Joe Biden has been blunt about Gershkovich’s arrest, urging Russia to “let him go.”
Russia’s predominant safety service, the FSB, claimed that Gershkovich, a correspondent based mostly in Moscow, had been making an attempt to acquire state secrets and techniques. The Wall Street Journal categorically rejected the accusation, saying in an announcement that it “vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned his arrest on Sunday, in line with an announcement launched by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
During the cellphone name, initiated by the American aspect, Lavrov advised Blinken that Gershkovich’s destiny could be decided by a Russian court docket, the assertion mentioned.
The Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, said Sunday that the decision between Blinken and Lavrov was “hugely reassuring.”
“We know that the US government is taking the case very seriously right up to the top,” she advised CBS News.
Gershkovich covers Russia, Ukraine and the previous Soviet Union, in line with his biography on the Wall Street Journal’s web site. He beforehand labored for information company Agence France-Presse, the Moscow Times and the New York Times.
In December, the US secured the release of basketball star Brittney Griner, detained final yr on what the US described as trumped-up drug smuggling expenses, in a prisoner swap for Russian arms supplier Viktor Bout. But the swap didn’t embody one other American whom the State Department has declared to be unlawfully detained, Paul Whelan.
In an electronic mail to the press Thursday after Gershkovich’s arrest, Paul’s brother David Whelan mentioned: “Our family is sorry to hear that another American family will have to experience the same trauma that we have had to endure for the past 1,553 days.”