MOSCOW, May 22. /TASS/. Consular access to Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia for espionage, will depend on the situation, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters on Monday.

Commenting on potential changes to the provision of consular access to Gershkovich, the senior Russian diplomat said that he was not currently ready to say how the situation could change. "Decisions are currently being made in a working order," he added.

"When we denied access last week, there was a situation where we simply could not make any other decision. It [the access] will depend on the situation," he maintained. "We gave quite a coherent explanation for the reasons why we did so. We’ll see what happens next."

According to the Public Relations Center of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Gershkovich, "acting at the behest of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of an enterprise within Russia’s military-industrial complex." The reporter was detained in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg in late March. FSB investigators opened a criminal case against the US citizen under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code (RCC) ("Espionage"). At that time, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the journalist had been "caught red-handed." Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court ordered that Gershkovich be held in custody until May 29.