The State Department has been in “direct touch with the Russian government” and is “actively working to secure consular access” to Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who Russia has detained and accused of espionage, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, said Thursday in a statement that it had detained Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen covering Russia and Ukraine, on charges of gathering confidential information about a Russian military enterprise. The newspaper vehemently denied the allegations demanded his immediate release.
Turkey’s parliament, meanwhile, has voted to approve Finland’s NATO membership bid, paving the way for the Nordic country to join the security alliance. The decision only applies to Finland, not Sweden, its neighbor and fellow membership hopeful. Both countries applied on the same day last year, having made the decision to join the alliance after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Russia detains U.S. journalist
Analysis from our correspondents
Cherkasov allegedly spent a decade building a fictitious persona as Ferreira, but the ambitious, high-risk operation included a side of self-defeating hubris. Parts of the information he was reportedly sending back to Moscow on the U.S. reaction ahead of the invasion of Ukraine, the FBI later concluded, came from an online group discussion led by a former professor.
He appears to have been a small part of a far broader intelligence failure by Russia that greatly overestimated how easily the invasion of Ukraine would play out, setting itself up for even more serious failures on the battlefield.
