would leave the u.s. soil and that s just to represent the usa. reporter: griner and her team unveiling a mural to represent other americans still being held in places like russian and iran and sending them this message. stay strong, keep fighting, don t give up. you know, it hurts it hurts because no one should be in those conditions. reporter: major newspapers are running full page ads calling for the white house to step up its efforts to bring home american wall street journal reporter evan gerschkovich with russia again denying an embassy request to visit him next week. this past weekend russian foreign minister sergei lavrov accused of the united states of rejecting the visas of russian reporters who were attempting to travel with lavrov to this week s meetings of the united nations to new york city. a state department spokesperson has rejected those claims and he s refused the consular visit for evan gerschkovich.
an accredited journalist as a hostage demonstrates again by the united states and its allies need to stand firm to block mr. putin s designs on ukraine we join our colleagues in expressing outrage of mr. gerschkovich s detention and in demanding his immediate release. joining us now national security reporter for the wall street g journal vivian salma you had an opportunity to ask antony blinken this week about the department designating evan as wrongfully detained first of all, what does that designation mean and secondly, what did blinken have to say to that question sam, that s right we were in brussels with the secretary of state and i had the opportunity to ask secretary blinken why they haven t done so yet. a wrongfully detained legislation is a really big step
against gerschkovich calling them, quote, preposterous and unjust the post notes many of the people who signed the letter were independent journalists working for russian news organizations based outside their homeland meanwhile the new york times editorial board is out with a new piece titled, quote, the arrest of evan gerschkovich is further evidence of putin s brutality. the board writes in part this, quote, russia has a rich history imprisoning people on bogus charges other than to help keep a dictator in power. once again people are being arrested and imprisoned not because they committed a crime but because they got in mr. putin s hair or he needed a hostage or he wanted to send a signal an accomplished and widely respected journalist mr. gerschkovich was seized by the fsb on march 29th and been accused with no evidence provided of espionage. the kremlin s readiness to seize
deal with it based on what he had inherited. on a social media site yesterday trump himself pushed back on the report writing, quote, biden is responsible, no one else nearly 200 afghans and 1,300 service members were killed during a suicide bombing atika ball s airport at the end of the withdrawal joining us now is congressional reporter for the republic. you had reporting on allies in afghanistan still stuck in the country. tell us about the situation and why they re still stuck there. reporter: frankly, it is not very reasonable to say that one administration is responsible for what happened in afghanistan. this happened over 20 years, but we do know that was the biden administration that oversaw that final evacuation and that now acknowledges that perhaps it could have started sooner because we did see hundreds of