From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, April 12th.

You know, we've mentioned on this show, but we haven't really talked in any detail yet about an American journalist being detained by

Russia a couple of weeks ago for the first time since 1986, since the depths of the Cold War

that an American has been detained reporting for a news organization in Russia. Between the Trump

indictment and the abortion pill rulings and mass shootings

followed by expulsion of the Tennessee lawmakers protesting mass shootings and the wave of

anti-trans laws getting passed at the same time, there has been such a crush of urgent seeming

justice stories in this country. We haven't gotten yet to really dig into the

plight of 31-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. So we will try to rectify that now

with Julia Eofi, founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, a Russia-born U.S.-based journalist herself,

Julia writes that there is something uniquely stomach-turning about the arrest of this U.S. citizen

of Soviet Jewish extraction.

Her article is called the abduction of Evan Gershkovich.

We'll also get Julia's take on the U.S. Intelligence Document leak

that could have implications for the war in Ukraine. Julie, always good to have you on. Welcome

back to WN.N.C. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Brian. And let me play a clip of Evan Gershkovich

to start out, just so our listeners have a sense of him, at least for 30 seconds,

as not just an abstraction, but a human being and a journalist. So here is about 30 seconds of him

talking last summer on a trip to Siberia. When I was in Kazakhstan, I spoke with a a lawmaker and he invoked this Siberian fairy tale.

So the story goes that a bear and this chipmunk were friends.

One day this bear was in a really good mood and it tries to pat the chipmunk on the back,

but it, you know, it still has claws and it scratched the chipmunk.

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