As the war in Ukraine marks 400 days on Friday, the gulf between the West and Russia has widened in decades since the arrest of a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Yekaterinburg by Russian authorities.

It has been 24 hours since Ivan Gershkovich was detained by the Russian intelligence and security service, the FSB, and so far not a single piece of evidence, document, video or other evidence has been released to the public proving that the 31-year-old correspondent with Russian roots actually acted in favor of the American authorities in according to the accusation.

Western relations with Moscow have now fallen to a new low, and, according to American experts, Russia will not rush to exchange Gershkovich for a Russian prisoner of war, as has happened in the past – after all, top officials of the Russian government are already reporting this.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Thursday that he condemned the detention of the WSJ correspondent and once again called on all Americans to leave Russia.

“We are deeply concerned about the highly publicized arrest of an American journalist in Russia. We are contacting the Wall Street Journal on this matter. “When a US citizen is detained abroad, we immediately begin to apply for consular access and try to provide all possible support,” the US Secretary of State said in a statement.

Mr. Blinken reiterated that it is now dangerous for American citizens to be in the territory of the Russian Federation, and urged them to “leave the country immediately.”

No recent precedent

As the New York Times notes in its analysis, Gershkovich’s arrest only exacerbates Russia’s international isolation.

“The Kremlin has taken an unprecedented step since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an extremely provocative move against one of the most prominent Western journalists still working in Russia and his employer, a mainstay of the American media.”

“The long-held notion that President Putin wants to keep some channels of communication with the West open is now obsolete,” the Times analysis adds.

Instead, Mr Putin appears to have accepted a state of political, economic and cultural alienation from the West more extreme than at any time since the end of the Cold War. It is a lockdown that has come at a breakneck pace, unimaginable even when Russia concentrated its forces on the border with Ukraine early last year.

“An era of open confrontation has begun,” Dmitry Muratov, editor of a Russian newspaper and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a telephone interview from Moscow. From the Kremlin’s point of view, he continued, “the bigger the conflict, the better.”