The arrest of a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia this week made it painfully obvious that news reporting there is a hazardous exercise, more so even than in the country it is attacking. Although reporting in Ukraine is not without risks, journalists can chronicle Vladimir Putin’s war without fear of arrest and detention on likely spurious charges. 

This appears to be the case with Evan Gershkovich, the reporter who is currently being detained in Moscow after agents of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB — successor to the KGB — plucked him from a restaurant at the city of Yekaterinburg and brought him to the Russian capital. 

“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the Journal said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

The newspaper reported that Mr. Gershkovich was ordered held in custody until May 29. At his hearing on Thursday, a Moscow court ruled that Mr. Gershkovich would be kept behind bars pending an investigation. While previous American detainees such as professional basketball player Brittney Griner have been freed in prisoner swaps, a top Russian official said it was too early to talk about any such deal, according to the AP.

Mr. Gershkovich, who had been very capably covering Russia, Ukraine, and other ex-Soviet nations as a correspondent in the Journal’s Moscow bureau, could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of espionage. The AP reported that prominent lawyers noted that past investigations into espionage cases took a year to 18 months, during which time the 31-year-old American son of Russian Jewish emigres from the former Soviet Union will likely have little contact with the outside world.

His court-appointed lawyer told reporters that he was unable to attend the initial hearing on Thursday. 

More troubling in this case than the predictable opaqueness of the Russian justice system is the language coming from the Kremlin, which likely orchestrated Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest on trumped-up charges. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “It is not about a suspicion, it is about the fact that he was caught red-handed.” 

The FSB claimed that Mr. Gershkovich was engaging in “espionage for the benefit of the United States” and accused him of having collected information “on a company of the Russian military-industrial complex.” It seems more likely that the reporter was having lunch in a restaurant at Yekaterinburg, the Russian city east of the Ural Mountains infamous as the site of the execution of the last reigning imperial Russian family, the Romanovs, in 1918.

Whether Mr. Gershkovich was working on a story about the Wagner mercenary group, the Russian defense industry, or anything related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is almost immaterial next to the hard fact of his present incarceration at the hands of an authoritarian regime. 

In a tweet, a Russian political analyst, Tatiana Stanovaya, said that “the problem is that the recently updated legislation and the FSB’s interpretation of espionage today allow for the imprisonment of anyone who is simply interested in military affairs.”

In a demonstration of just how bad things have gotten in Russia since President Putin pushed through draconian censorship laws, a Russian father was recently sentenced to two years in prison because of an anti-war sketch his 13-year-old daughter made at school. The father fled house arrest and is currently being held in custody in Belarus. His daughter was sent to an orphanage. 

This is the ugly face of Russia in 2023.

“The targeting of American citizens by the Russian government is unacceptable. We condemn the detention of Mr. Gershkovich in the strongest terms,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement. The White House has reportedly spoken to both the Journal and to Mr. Gershkovich’s family. 

What Washington could do to secure the young reporter’s freedom right now was not immediately clear. In a statement, Secretary Blinken said: “In the strongest possible terms, we condemn the Kremlin’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish journalists and civil society voices.” Whether that statement will translate into action remains to be seen. 

The White House National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, told the reporters that the American Embassy in Moscow has been in contact with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs — which had accredited Mr. Gershkovich to work as a journalist in Russia — and is seeking consular access to him, ostensibly while he remains in custody.

In December, Ms. Griner was freed after spending10 months behind bars. She was exchanged for a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout. Paul Whelan has been imprisoned in Russia since December 2018 on espionage charges that his family and Washington have rejected. 

“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,” Mr. Whelan’s brother, David, said in an emailed statement to the AP. “It sounds as though the frame-up of Mr. Gershkovich was the same as it was in Paul’s case.”

According to the Journal, Mr. Kirby also said it was not clear if Mr. Gershkovich’s detention was coordinated with Russian leadership, or aimed as retaliation for other grievances. The newspaper noted that last week a 37-year-old Russian national, Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, was charged in U.S. District Court at Washington, D.C., with acting as an agent of a foreign power, visa fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, and other charges stemming from his alleged illegal activities in America.