Alwaght- The US uses journalists as its intelligence agents, said Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
Commenting on how the US "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, according to Tass news agency.
"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.
She added: "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."
"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.
She pointed to the reality 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 went on.
Gershkovich, a correspondent for the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, was arrested in March last year in Russia in an espionage case. According to the Center for Public Relations of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex.