{"id":57951,"date":"2023-05-16T10:49:07","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T17:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=57951"},"modified":"2023-05-16T10:49:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T17:49:07","slug":"condemning-the-arrest-of-robert-shonov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=57951","title":{"rendered":"Condemning the Arrest of Robert Shonov"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>05\/16\/2023 12:54 PM EDT<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Matthew Miller, Department Spokesperson<\/p>\n<p>The United States strongly condemns the reported arrest of Robert Shonov, a former employee of U.S. Mission Russia.\u00a0 The allegations against Mr. Shonov are wholly without merit.\u00a0 Mr. Shonov is a Russian national who was employed by the U.S. Consulate General in Vladivostok for more than 25 years.\u00a0 Following the Russian government\u2019s April 2021\u00a0order forcing\u00a0termination of all local staff employed at the U.S. Mission to Russia, Mr. Shonov\u00a0was employed by a company contracted to provide services to\u00a0U.S. Embassy in Moscow in strict compliance with Russia\u2019s laws and regulations.<\/p>\n<p>Like any diplomatic mission in the world \u2013 including the Russia\u2019s Mission in the United States \u2013 the U.S. Embassy contracts for local services to operate its diplomatic mission.\u00a0 Mr. Shonov\u2019s only role at the time of his arrest was to compile media summaries of\u00a0press items from publicly available Russian media sources.\u00a0 His being targeted under the \u201cconfidential cooperation\u201d statute highlights the Russian Federation\u2019s blatant use of increasingly repressive laws against its own citizens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>05\/16\/2023 12:54 PM EDT &nbsp; Matthew&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57952,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57951\/revisions\/57952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}