WASHINGTON, May 3. /TASS/. Washington actively interacts with Moscow on the case of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, arrested in Russia for espionage, but there is no clear way forward yet, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview for the Washington Post Wednesday.

"I wish I could say that in this moment there was a clear way forward. We don’t have that in this moment," the Secretary of State said, commenting on Gershkovich’s case.

"We’re intensely engaged with the Russians to seek his freedom, to seek his immediate release - short of that, just to get what Russia’s obligated to provide, which is consular access, which they’ve done once but have yet to repeat," Blinken noted.

He confirmed that he discussed this case with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once, adding that no further such contacts followed.

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; criminal proceedings were initiated against him under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code (Espionage). According to Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Gershkovich was caught red-handed. The Lefortovo court in Moscow has sanctioned his arrest until May 29.

On April 27, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the US request for consular visit to Gershkovich on May 11 was denied. A senior diplomat of the US embassy in Moscow was summoned to the Foreign Ministry that day and presented with a note of protest over the disruption of provision of visas to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s reporter pool during his recent visit to the UN headquarters in New York.

"It was particularly emphasized that an act of sabotage [failure to issue visas to a group of journalists who were to accompany Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on a trip to New York as members of an official delegation] aimed at hindering normal journalistic work will not remain without retaliation. In this connection, the US embassy has been informed that its request for a consular visit on May 11 this year to US citizen Gershkovich, detained on charges of spying, has been rejected," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.