After the exchange of journalist Evan Gershkovich and US Marine Paul Whelan, the FSB decided to show the video of their detention

REN TV and Russia Today have published a video of the arrest of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich and Marine Paul Whelan. RT calls the recordings its "exclusive", REN TV directly refers to the FSB.

The video of Gershkovich shows the journalist talking to a man whose face is blurred in a restaurant, and then men in civilian clothes approach him. One of the men grabs Gershkovich by the head, after which he is handcuffed. The footage also shows the journalist lying on the floor.

The FSB claims that Gershkovich communicated with a representative of the defense company Uralvagonzavod. As REN TV reports, citing the agency, the journalist showed him a list of questions and an editorial assignment, and the plant employee suggested that the data could constitute a state secret. According to the FSB, the information that Gershkovich was interested in was classified, and he was caught red-handed when he tried to obtain it.

The secret service also provided the propagandists with a fragment of a conversation between two people. One of them says: "Please be very careful, because there is some really secret information there." The second one replies: "We won't even write that we saw these documents. We will only have an anonymous source. That is, neither we are suspected of collecting, nor is anyone suspected of surrendering." RT writes that this is a recording of a conversation between Gershkovich and his "informant."

Whelan, the FSB reported, was detained on December 28, 2018, when he received a flash drive from an “informant” with “secret information regarding FSB personnel,” REN TV reports. The men met in the toilet of a room at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.

The video from the toilet shows the man handing Whelan a small white object, which he places in his pocket. There is no sound on the recording.

Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg. On July 19, 2024, the court sentenced him to 16 years in a maximum-security penal colony for espionage (Article 276 of the Criminal Code). According to the investigation, the journalist was collecting data on the activities of Uralvagonzavod "on assignment from the CIA." The Wall Street Journal insisted that Gershkovich was doing journalistic work and called the espionage charges fictitious.

Whelan was sentenced to the same term and under the same article in 2020. According to investigators, the former Marine Corps sergeant began coming to Russia in 2007 and collected classified information during his trips, as well as tried to recruit FSB and Defense Ministry employees. His defense insisted that Whelan was detained because of a flash drive that a friend gave him, who decided to set up the American for the sake of promotion. Whelan himself believed that the information carrier contained photos from a tourist trip.

On August 1, Gershkovich and Whelan returned to the United States — Russia released them as part of a prisoner swap with Western countries. The deal also included Russian political prisoners, including politicians Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and artist Sasha Skochilenko. As part of the swap, Moscow returned former FSB officer Vadim Krasikov, who was sentenced to life in prison in Germany for the murder of a Chechen field commander.