WSJ Marks Evan Gershkovich’s 1-Year Detention With Stunning Blank Front Page

“His story should be here,” the headline boldly reads over a gaping blank front page across Wall Street Journal newspapers distributed Friday.

The powerful print marks exactly one year since American journalist and WSJ correspondent Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on espionage charges. Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government have denied the alleged crimes, which a trial date has yet to be set for.

His actual crime is “journalism,” The Wall Street Journal asserts at the top of its newspaper recognizing his “one year stolen”: “A year of stolen stories, stolen joys, stolen memories.”

“It is well past time for this talented reporter and innocent man to come home,” the paper’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, said in an open letter Friday that recognized not just Gershkovich’s capture, but the detention of hundreds of other journalists in global, targeted attacks on the free press.

“Evan has shown remarkable willpower, strength and even humor during his wrongful detention. We are amazed at his—and his family’s—steadfastness in the face of such a harrowing ordeal,” Tucker wrote. “But their fortitude doesn’t change the fact that Evan’s detention is a blatant attack on the rights of the free press at a time when evidence abounds around the globe of the vital role that quality journalism plays in our society’s understanding of world events and in bearing witness to history.”

“We know that he is innocent of what he’s being accused of. He’s a journalist,” Gershkovich’s father, Mikhail Gershkovich, told The Wall Street Journal in a sit-down interview with wife Ella Milman ahead of the anniversary of their son’s capture.

Milman said that she stays up late to follow overseas court hearings for updates and to