Two U.S. citizens helped the Chinese government set up a secret, illegal “police station” in a Chinatown office building last year, setting up a spy operation to track and harass dissidents living in America, federal prosecutors said Monday.

The arrests of Lu Jianwang, 61, of the Bronx, and Chen Jianping, 59, of Manhattan, Monday morning, came as federal authorities charged dozens of officials with China’s Ministry of Public Security, or MPS, with running online operations to harass and troll dissidents, and have their Zoom meetings canceled.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been arrested in Russia on suspicion of espionage, the first time a US journalist has been detained on accusations by Moscow of spying since the Cold War.

“The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation has stopped the illegal activities of US citizen Evan Gershkovich, born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal,” Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in a statement Thursday.

Russia’s main security agency said it had detained a Wall Street Journal reporter for what it described as espionage.  

The Federal Security Service said Thursday it had detained Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, in the eastern city of Yekaterinburg.

The FSB said in a statement that Mr. Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

Russia has detained an American journalist, accusing him of espionage and launching a criminal case against him.

Evan Gershkovich is a U.S. citizen and reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering Russia, Ukraine, and more, per his Twitter profile. He was arrested in Yekaterinburg on Wednesday by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, according to Meduza, a Russian-focused news website.

Three more objects were shot down by the U.S. military over the weekend after officials said they posed a threat to civilian airspace. 

The remarkable development came roughly one week after the U.S. shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina days after it was first reported to be hovering over the continental United States.

President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday authorized the mission, and Biden ordered the U.S. military to send an F-22 fighter jet to take the object down in Canadian territory.

The public spent Super Bowl weekend anxiously watching the skies as the U.S. military shot down a series of unidentified flying objects over the United States and Canada.

The Pentagon oversaw the shooting down of three unidentified objects in as many days — the first on Friday over Alaska, the second on Saturday over Canada's Yukon territory, and the third on Sunday over Lake Huron. The chaotic series of events came just over a week after the U.S. downed a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic coast.

The unidentified object the U.S. shot down Sunday over Lake Huron was the fourth taken down over North America in less than two weeks and the third in as many days.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told ABC News that U.S. officials believe an object shot down Friday over Alaska, as well as the one downed Saturday over Canada, were balloons. So was the object shot down this month off South Carolina, which officials said China was using for surveillance.

One of the fundamental duties of the federal government is “to provide for the common defense,” but our elected leaders are failing us. The world watched last week as a Chinese spy balloon blatantly floated up to our military base in Alaska, down to our missile silos in Montana, and took a sharp right turn across the northern United States. It was not until the public noticed its presence that the Biden Administration scrambled for options on how to deal with spy apparatus.

Four previous Chinese spy balloon flights over the United States passed over sites that would be of interest to Beijing, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, without elaborating on whether they passed over military bases.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington was gaining more information "almost by the hour" on the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the U.S. East Coast on Saturday. He said the United States will share relevant findings with Congress and allies around the world.

The U.S. intelligence community has linked the Chinese spy balloon shot down on Saturday to a vast surveillance program run by the People’s Liberation Army, and U.S. officials have begun to brief allies and partners who have been similarly targeted.