Now turning to an assault on press freedom abroad.

Over 300 foreign correspondents who have worked in Russia are demanding the immediate release of a Wall Street journal reporter.

In a letter to the Russian government, they condemned Russia's accusations of espionage and said the arrest is "a disturbing and dangerous signal against honest journalism."

At the U.N. security Council today, Linda Thomas-Greenfield also called out Russia for their violation of human rights and detention of American citizens.

>> Right now he is being wrongfully detained by the Russian government simply for doing his job as a respected journalist.

Host: Anton Troianovski discusses his reporting with Walter Isaacson.

Walter: Thank you and welcome to the show.

Anton Thank you for having me.

Walter: Your friend and sometime competitor was detained in Russia.

Before we get into the charges, tell me a little bit about him as a person.

Anton He is a brilliant journalist, a great friend.

You pointed out he is a competitor which is straightly speaking true.

He was working for the Wall Street Journal in Moscow and I was with the New York Times.

Just an incredibly supportive colleague.

Someone who would always reach out when you had a good story, someone who was never shy about sharing contacts or ideas.

He was really one of those correspondents when you're working in a place like Moscow where it can be tough to report, you really need journalists to support each other.

That's what he was doing.

Walter: You told a story about some salmon roe he brought you.

It humanized him to tell me about that.

-- it humanized him.

Tell me about that.

Anton: Of course.

I've been based in Berlin since last year.

Walter: Because you had to leave Moscow?

Anton: Exactly.

I've been based in Berlin and he was visiting Berlin.

For New Year's he came to my house and got some salmon roe, which they call red caviar in Russia, it is a traditional Russian food for new year's.

That's how I think about him now.

As someone who was always very caring and really cared about Russia.

Which is a country where he grew up, his parents are Soviet émigrés.

He grew up in New Jersey speaking Russian at home.

He was really interested and excited about being in Russia and getting to know the country, getting to know its traditions.

Walter: You and he share that in a way coming from families that are Soviet or Russian imagery -- in the gray -- emigree families.

Anton: It's really tough right now what is going on.

I am also from a Russian immigrant family and I worked in Russia as a journalist.

You could never have full insight into the Russian soul but we did feel, I think Evan and I, a special connection to the place and a special responsibility to tell people as best we could about what was going on in Russia with its nuances and complexities.

That is something you saw Evan do.

He bravely continued to report from Russia after the war began.

He just really felt a special responsibility to make a special duty, as one of the few American journalists working there at the time, to really tell people about what was going on, speak to everyone he could.

Both pro and antiwar, and try to explain to the world was happening in Russia at this time.

Walter: The Russians say he was arrested for espionage and the West say he was unlawfully detained.

Why do you think the Russian authorities did arrest him?

Anton: The charges are espionage, which are absurd, this is a journalist who was doing his job.

I think this is really part of this overall escalation you are seeing input and'-- in putin's conflict with the West in the U.S. in particular.

We have had this crackdown on the Free Press in Russia for years now under Vladimir Putin.

For most of that time, he really mainly affected the Russian press, Russian journalists who were jailed, exiled, in some cases even killed in the country.

Now this crackdown has come to affect Western turn a list speared I think -- Western journalists.

I think his passport made him more of a target.

We see Russia practicing essentially hostagetaking with American citizens.

Walter: Do you think he might be a hostage in the way he's been taken so he can be traded for some deals?

Anton: I believe that unfortunately is how you have to look at it.

That's what it looks like.

The Russians still have prisoners, people in prison in Western countries that they apparently want back.

We don't know for certain this is the case.

At this point we can only speculate, although there have been Russian officials who have already been speculating about a prisoner exchange after Evan is convicted, which is something in the very Kremlin-controlled judicial system in Russia, unfortunately we can expect to happen.

But it is also part, as I said, over the -- of the overall escalation of Putin's conflict with the West, a way to show he is ready to take actions to escalate the conflict.

Walter: Is this the first time a Western journalist since the Cold War has been arrested in Russia?

And does that signal a new phase of this?

Anton: Yes, I think it does.

The last time a Western journalist was arrested for espionage was not even in Russia, it was the Soviet Union in the 1980's.

That was a case that took only a few weeks to play out until that correspondent was freed.

In this case it has already taken longer, it has already been close to a month that Evan has been detained.

And it is a new phase.

This very unpredictable phrase, frankly, of the conflict.

This is one of those things that would have been really hard to imagine not long ago.

Walter: You've written about an outburst of solidarity, I think you called it, among at least some segments of the Russian population in favor of Evan and perhaps in resistance to what is happening in Russia.

To what extent is that happening now, some pushback against what Russian leaders are doing?

Anton: Overall, there is still pushback inside the country.

Thousands of people have been arrested for speaking out against the war.

Russia has become a country where you can get a year long prison term for so much as criticizing the war and the Russian president on social media.

There is still that kind of pushback happening, it's just being repressed in an incredibly aggressive way.

As for Evan, I've been really moved by the outburst of solidarity from Russian journalists.

Most of them are now in exile outside the country.

Because it was for a number of years, it was Evan.

The rest of us in the Western press corps that were writing about the crackdown on Russian journalists and giving voice to their plight.

Now the roles have been reversed.

It is Russian journalists helping Western journalists try to figure out how to help Evan.

That article I wrote, I was trying to send him a letter using this online letterwriting service for Russian prisons and the person who helped me was the fiancé of a Russian journalist who was in prison right now and has been since 2020.

She showed me how to use the service, just as one tiny example of the outburst of solidarity we are seeing.

Walter: Do you think the Russian people are generally supportive of this reaction against the West, or is there some sentiment among the Russian people that they are better off being closer to the West?

Anton: That has really fluctuated, that sentiment.

Obviously there was a lot of pro-Western sentiment 30 years ago when the Soviet Union was collapsing.

Now there is a lot less of that.

I think a big reason is the propaganda.

If you turn on the TV in Russia, no matter what channel, it is going to be a pro-Kremlin channel where you will have hours of talk shows and newscasts every day telling you about why the West is evil, why the West, led by America, wants to destroy Russia, and how put in -- Putin has made Russia an independent, sovereign actor on the world stage.

Many people who believe that.

There also people as always saying earlier, who despite this repression, are still trying to speak out and say to their fellow Russians that what is happening now is wrong.

There's also a big set I think of the population that just sees there is nothing they can do about this situation.

The fact that Putin appears to be firmly in power, there aren't any political groups we can see that would challenge him in the near term.

When people see there is nothing really they can change about a situation, I think they also look for ways to kind of rationalize it in their mind or pay as little attention as possible.

I think you've got a big group of Russians inside the country who feel that way.

Walter: Russian opposition -- the Russian Opposition leader was sentenced to 25 years in prison this past week for opposing the Ukraine war, for treason.

He was on his way to be on this show when he got arrested.

Tell me about that sentence P is it an -- sentence.

Is it unusually harsh?

Anton: It is incredibly harsh even by Russian standards.

Even people who are convicted of murder typically get a shorter sentence than 25 years in Russia.

It tells us that again, this escalation in repression is continuing.

Another key thing to point out is he was convicted of treason.

And the treasonous actions he took in the narrative of the government are that he spoke out against the war and against Vladimir Putin.

That tells you that now speaking out against the leadership of Russia can be tantamount to treason.

This comes as both Putin and others in Russian leadership are referring to people who are against the war who are pro-Western as potential trait ors, and that tells you how incredibly repressive it is inside Russia, and when it comes to these kind of repressive actions we frankly can only expect them to get more intense.

Walter: A year ago after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a big deal in United States and west by putting on crushing sanctions, we said it would bring the Russian economy down and especially hurt oligarchs.

Your reporting shows that hasn't happened.

Why?

Anton: Look, the sections have certainly affected Russia's economy.

They have led to some decline in the country's economic output.

But it has been limited.

The government has found ways to reduce the impact of those sanctions.

Western cars are no longer being officially imported into Russia, but there are all kinds of parallel export schemes, as they call them, that allow cars and other Western consumer goods to be imported into Russia through other countries that are not part of the sanctions.

Chinese car manufacturers have become huge in Russia, and other Chinese consumer electronics.

Western companies like Starbucks and McDonald's and IKEA have left but alternatives have been popping up.

At the same time, the overall economy continues to keep going.

There is not mass unemployment.

Walter: How did we miscalculate the sanctions so badly?

Anton: I think the sanctions were incredibly aggressive.

They were more intense than we have seen -- Walter: But the Russian economy is not doing much worse than other economies at the moment.

Anton: I think what we've seen is the success of the Russian government's planning for this kind of thing.

We've been talking for a number of years that Putin has been working on sanctions proofing his economy, piling up reserves through the country's central bank.

Walter: You say he's even getting heart technology.

We were supposed to stop some of the technology, some of the chips, but they are getting in.

Anton: Yeah, because many countries around the world are not participating in the sanctions like China, India, all of the Central Asian countries that border Russia to the south.

There are still many places that Putin can turn to around the world as economic partners, and at the same time, his economy really functions in a way that it's not as susceptible to Western sanctions as it would have been five or 10 years ago.

Walter: You've been writing a lot about the leaks of national security documents in the United States.

First of all, tell me about what those leaks tell us about what is happening inside the Kremlin.

Anton: Well, there was one document in particular that pointed to some competition between the FSB, the dementia intelligence agency that used to be called the KGB, and the Russian military.

According to one of the documents it looks like the FSB is saying internally the Russian military is saying there are fewer casualties in the war on the Russian side than there really are.

At the same time, we did not see much in those documents that would show the United States has a direct knowledge of what is happening in Putin's inner circle.

Obviously those documents are a tiny subset of what American intelligence agencies no.

-- know.

We are not seeing much evidence that the U.S. has deep insight into the Kremlin that a lot of people are looking for.

Walter: Anton Troianovski, thank you for joining us.