MOSCOW, April 5. /TASS/. US special services use journalists as their agents in violation of US laws, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Commenting on how the United States "celebrated" a year since the arrest of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal journalist, accused of espionage in Russia, the diplomat drew attention to the way one of the latest March issues of The Wall Street Journal looks - almost the entire front page is blank. "And only the black and white face of Evan Gershkovich, a US citizen detained on suspicion of espionage, caught in the act, with the phrase 'His story should be here,'" she wrote on her Telegram channel. "Evan Gershkovich could have written about the terrorist bombing of Russian cities by the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev in recent months. The militants are also shelling journalists, including American journalists - it could be a report from a hot spot that the Americans themselves created by pumping weapons and intelligence into the militants," she pointed out.

"He could have written a great article about all the fellow journalists killed by the Kiev regime: Oles Buzina, Pavel Sheremet, Andrey Stenin, Anatoly Klein, Igor Kornelyuk, Anton Voloshin, and many others. He could have, but for some reason he didn't write [about it] all those years he had worked in Russia. He could have, if he had been practicing journalism and not spying," the spokeswoman emphasized. "By the way, I do not exclude that the American media was expressing its indignation at the American secret services, which continue to use journalists as their agents in violation of US law," she said.

Zakharova pointed to the fact that "no newspaper in the United States has ever published a similar black square" in support of American journalist Gonzalo Lira, "who spent eight months in the torture chambers of a Ukrainian prison and was finally killed by the Ukrainian Security Service in January." "By the way, has a criminal case been opened in the US for his murder? I haven't heard of it," she added.

Gershkovich case

Gershkovich, a correspondent for the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, was arrested in Russia in an espionage case. According to the Center for Public Relations of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), Gershkovich, "acting as an agent for the American side, collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex." In this connection, the journalist was detained in Yekaterinburg at the end of March 2023; criminal proceedings were initiated against him under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code ("Espionage"). Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison. He has not pleaded guilty.