ORA Russian court on Friday sentenced American journalist Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison for espionage, an accusation that the reporter, his family and the White House strongly deny.
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The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal journalist will have to serve his sentence in a “strict regime” penal colony, ordered Judge Andrei Mineyev, according to an AFP journalist present at the court in Yekaterinburg.
Gershkovich was arrested during a report in this Ural city in late March 2023.
Prosecutors accuse him of having collected sensitive information for the CIA about one of Russia’s main arms manufacturers, Uralvagonzavod, which produces the T-90 tanks used in Ukraine.
The United States believes his arrest is aimed at forcing a possible prisoner swap amid tensions between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine.
“This shameful and false conviction comes after Evan has spent 478 days in prison, wrongfully detained, kept away from his family and friends, prevented from reporting, all for doing his job as a journalist,” Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour and editor-in-chief Emma Tucker said in a statement.
Gershkovich, a correspondent for the American business daily and a former AFP journalist in Moscow, has been detained in Russia for almost 16 months.
Friday’s hearing was the third since the trial against him began on June 26. The second session, initially scheduled for August, was brought forward to Thursday at the request of the defense.
Typically, trials for such charges in Russia take several weeks or even months.
The United Nations had called for the journalist’s release.
Gershkovich is the first Western journalist to be accused of espionage in Russia since Soviet times. His arrest sparked a wave of solidarity in the American and European media.
Russia has admitted that it is negotiating his release and its president, Vladimir Putin, has even mentioned the case of Vadim Krasikov, imprisoned in Germany for a murder ordered by Russian special services.
The reporter, the son of immigrants who fled the Soviet Union for the United States, settled in Russia in 2017.
In late June, the White House denounced the trial as a “sham” and insisted that the reporter had “never worked for the US government.”
Shortly afterwards, a United Nations panel of experts declared his detention arbitrary and called for his immediate release.
On the first day of the trial, June 26, the journalist appeared with his head shaved and smiling in the glass booth reserved for the accused.
Although he could not make any statements, he made gestures to the people he knew in the room.
For now, he can only communicate with his family and friends through letters read and censored by the prison administration. In them he says he remains in good spirits and resigns himself to his sentence.
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