Robert Shonov, recognized as a former worker of the U.S. Embassy in Russia, was arrested within the Russian metropolis of Vladivostok and charged with conspiracy, according to the Russian state news agency Tass. The report didn’t determine his nationality.

Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, instructed reporters at a briefing on Monday that he had seen the report however that “I don’t have anything additional to offer at this time.”

Tass, quoting an nameless legislation enforcement official, stated that Mr. Shonov was accused of “collaboration on a confidential basis with a foreign state or international or foreign organization.” He has been taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, Tass reported, and no courtroom date has been set.

Being held in isolation is commonplace at Lefortovo, a infamous high-security jail whose inmates at present embody Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was accused of espionage in March, costs that his employer and American officers have strongly denied. It can be the place Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who’s serving a 16-year sentence on what the United States has stated are fabricated charges of espionage, was held for 20 months till his trial in 2020. He is now at a pressured labor camp a number of hundred miles away.

In the Soviet period, the Ok.G.B. saved Soviet dissidents on the jail, and it has been used extra lately to isolate opponents of the Kremlin.