The Kremlin left little doubt on Thursday that Mr. Putin had personally approved Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest. Hours after the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the K.G.B., announced that the reporter had been detained “during an attempt to receive secret information,” Mr. Putin’s spokesman volunteered that the American journalist had been caught “red-handed.”
The Wall Street Journal strongly rejected the accusations against Mr. Gershkovich and said it would seek his immediate release.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, also told reporters that other Wall Street Journal correspondents in Russia “will continue to work” if they “are carrying out normal journalistic activity” — as if to try to signal that the arrest was a one-off case.
After Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, the White House and Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, issued statements reiterating the Biden administration’s position that Americans should not travel to Russia, and that those who were already in the country should leave at once.
“We condemn the detention of Mr. Gershkovich in the strongest terms,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. The State Department, she added, “has been in direct touch with the Russian government on this matter, including actively working to secure consular access to Mr. Gershkovich.”
Mr. Putin himself said nothing about Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest on Thursday. But he has offered vague warnings in speeches of his readiness to raise tensions with the West, and has increasingly described the United States and its allies as outright enemies of Russia. In his state-of-the-nation speech last month, he declared that the West sought to destroy Russia — “to finish us off once and for all.”
“This is how we understand everything, and we will respond accordingly,” Mr. Putin said.
Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor close to Kremlin officials, said he believed that after more than a year of war, Mr. Putin was now ready to sever ties with Western countries in a way he was not prepared to do in the first months of his invasion of Ukraine.
