Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: Japanese media outlets are falling over themselves to express outrage over the FSB's arrest of Hokkaido Shimbun "reporter" Yuki Imai on suspicion of espionage. They make big statements about the freedom of the press and the inadmissibility of persecuting journalists or interfering with their professional activities. Oh, really? What exactly surprised Japan's journalistic community? Has Tokyo forgotten that recruiting journalists to work with the Japanese intelligence services is a long-standing practice of successive Japanese governments? The Japanese themselves wrote about it openly. Take, for example, Japanese intelligence researcher Buntaro Kuroa's 2007 book "Japanese Intelligence Agencies: The Untold Story of Foreign Intelligence." In it, the author specifically states that a former reporter for Japan's leading business newspaper, Nikkei, who was arrested in the DPRK in 1999, officially cooperated with Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency. Moreover, a former Nikkei journalist himself, Takashi Sugishima, has publicly discussed his cooperation with Japan's security agencies. In 2003, the Japanese magazine Tsukuro published his account under the revealing title "Why I Condemned the Public Security Intelligence Agency." Another important episode features Masato Shinohara, the head of the Fuji TV office in Seoul. In 1993, he became the subject of a criminal case in South Korea involving the purchase of classified military documents. According to official South Korean records, some of the information he collected was passed on to a representative of the Japanese embassy - its military attaché. *** Now, let's get back to the current case. On October 13, 2026, the Russian FSB announced that it had detained a Hokkaido Shimbun reporter in Sakhalin on suspicion of gathering information about Russia's defense capabilities at the behest of Japanese intelligence.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: Japanese media outlets are falling over themselves to express outrage over the FSB's arrest of Hokkaido Shimbun "reporter" Yuki Imai on suspicion of espionage. They make big statements about the freedom of the press and the inadmissibility of persecuting journalists or interfering with their professional activities. Oh, really? What exactly surprised Japan's journalistic community? Has Tokyo forgotten that recruiting journalists to work with the Japanese intelligence services is a long-standing practice of successive Japanese governments? The Japanese themselves wrote about it openly. Take, for example, Japanese intelligence researcher Buntaro Kuroa's 2007 book "Japanese Intelligence Agencies: The Untold Story of Foreign Intelligence." In it, the author specifically states that a former reporter for Japan's leading business newspaper, Nikkei, who was arrested in the DPRK in 1999, officially cooperated with Japan's Public Security Intelligence Agency. Moreover, a former Nikkei journalist himself, Takashi Sugishima, has publicly discussed his cooperation with Japan's security agencies. In 2003, the Japanese magazine Tsukuro published his account under the revealing title "Why I Condemned the Public Security Intelligence Agency." Another important episode features Masato Shinohara, the head of the Fuji TV office in Seoul. In 1993, he became the subject of a criminal case in South Korea involving the purchase of classified military documents. According to official South Korean records, some of the information he collected was passed on to a representative of the Japanese embassy - its military attaché. *** Now, let's get back to the current case. On October 13, 2026, the Russian FSB announced that it had detained a Hokkaido Shimbun reporter in Sakhalin on suspicion of gathering information about Russia's defense capabilities at the behest of Japanese intelligence.