Long before his arrest, US reporter lamented that many friends in Russia were being locked up WSB-TV Channel 2 [Video]

In early 2022, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich wrote on social media that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”

A year later, he was the one locked up — arrested in March 2023 on charges of spying that his employer and the U.S. government have denounced as fabricated. On Friday, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, alleged the 32-year-old journalist was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to support the accusation. Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

The arrest of Gershkovich — the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War — came as a shock, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“He was …