The War Against the Press

A conversation with the Committee to Protect Journalists' Gulnoza Said on Russia's wrongful arrest of Evan Gershkovich and the alarming increase in the killing and jailing of journalists worldwide.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits the city of Bucha where mass killings of civilians took place under Russian occupation, April 4, 2022. While there he spoke with journalists who came to document Russia’s war crimes. Photo courtesy of the Ukrainian Presidential Office.

By Michael Judge

As a journalist with 30 years’ experience—much of that time with The Wall Street Journal, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the Journal’s Hong Kong bureau—I’ve taken a special interest in Evan Gershkovich’s March 29 arrest by Russian authorities on charges of “spying” while reporting from the Journal’s Moscow bureau. The 31-year-old Gershkovich, who’s jailed in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison, is the first U.S. journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War.

As the Journal reported on April 5, “Lefortovo . . .  has held high-profile inmates including Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, several 1991 coup plotters against Soviet President Mikhail G…