The Russian authorities said on Thursday that they had detained an American journalist, Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent based in Moscow, accusing him of espionage.
The Federal Security Service, known by its Russian acronym F.S.B., said in a statement about Mr. Gershkovich that “on the instructions of the United States, he was collecting information about one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex, which constitute a state secret.” The F.S.B. is a successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B.
Mr. Gershkovich was detained in Yekaterinburg, a city about 900 miles east of Moscow, in the Ural Mountains, according to Russian state-run news outlets, which reported the F.S.B. statement.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow did not immediately comment on the report. A spokeswoman for Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Gershkovich has worked for the Journal in Moscow since January 2022 and previously reported in Russia for Agence France-Presse and The Moscow Times. Before that, he was a news assistant for The New York Times, based in New York.
