One year ago Friday, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich received a chilling phone call from the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Their son, Evan, a foreign correspondent for the Journal who was on a reporting assignment in Russia, had missed his daily security check-in.

“We were hoping this was some kind of error, that everything is going to be fine,” Mikhail Gershkovich recalled. But the stunning reality became clear: Russian authorities had detained Evan and accused him of spying for the American government, making him the first American reporter to be held on espionage charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War.