The trial against Evan Gershkovich, the Russian correspondent of The Wall Street Journal The 32-year-old Gershkovich, arrested in March 2023 while preparing reports on the invasion of Ukraine, has ended with a harsh sentence of 16 years in prison under a strict prison regime. The court of the Sverdlovsk province, the region where European Russia ends and Asian Russia begins, has handed down the punishment after a brief trial of just three sessions behind closed doors in which the Russian secret service maintained its charges of espionage against the American journalist. The Kremlin thus formalizes a procedure that has turned Gershkovich, 32, into an asset with which to negotiate the exchange of Russian spies arrested abroad.
The proceedings were accelerated this week: the court brought forward the second session of the trial to Thursday at the request of the defence, originally scheduled for 13 August, and the Russian prosecution requested 18 years in prison against him on Friday morning. After several hours of supposed deliberation, the court announced the sentence. On the first day of the trial against Gershkovich, held on 26 June, the correspondent reappeared, physically exhausted and with a shaved head. The image shocked his colleagues in Russia. “We will tell Evan’s story until he can tell it himself,” he promised this week. The Wall Street Journal along with the hashtag #EstoyconEvan.
Gershkovich, who was accredited to work in the country by the Russian Foreign Ministry, has always maintained his innocence. The Russian Federal Security Service – the FSB, heir to the Soviet KGB – arrested the American reporter on March 29, 2023 in a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, the capital of Sverdlovsk. Gershkovich had traveled to that region to make several reports on a famous tank factory in the country, Uralvagonzavod, and the Russian view of the Wagner mercenary group. One of the people with whom the journalist spoke, a regional deputy from Putin’s party, Vyacheslav Wegner, was questioned on Thursday as a witness. “He was interested in the support of the population for the special military operation,” the politician later told reporters.
The Wall Street Journal The American authorities deny the accusations against Gershkovich, calling them a fabrication. According to the FSB, Gershkovich worked “on the instructions of the American side and collected secret information on the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” However, your newspaper suspects that the journalist’s imprisonment for espionage, the first such case since the Cold War, is intended to exchange him for a real Kremlin secret agent. Vadim Krasikov, the FSB spy who murdered Chechen dissident Tornike Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019, is in the running.
Putin acknowledged that there were contacts regarding Gershkovich in an interview he gave to controversial US presenter Tucker Carlson on 8 February. “I think that an agreement can be reached,” the Russian president said. For his part, Biden declared on 13 June that he was “serious” about the journalist’s release. Indeed, Gershkovich’s fate has become one of the key issues in the US election campaign: Donald Trump promised a month earlier, in May, that the Wall Street Journal correspondent would return home if he won the November presidential election thanks to his good relationship with the Kremlin. “Vladimir Putin will do it for me, not for anyone else, and we won’t pay anything!” said the Republican.
The detention and exchange of citizens has become a dangerous political game between Russia and the US since they exchanged American basketball player Brittney Griner for powerful Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in December 2022, just months after the war against Ukraine began.
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“By agreement between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, the intelligence services of the two countries (Russia and the US) have been in contact since June 2021 to exchange one citizen for another,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday. According to the diplomat, “although this issue (the imprisonment of the journalist) does not benefit from the noise and from time to time the Americans bring it up in the public space, these contacts do exist.”
Lavrov said Moscow had “irrefutable evidence” that Gershkovich was involved in espionage. “I want to assure you that we are in favour of journalism and freedom of speech as much as you are,” the Russian foreign minister said. In addition to Gershkovich, the Kremlin has also imprisoned Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva of the US outlet Radio Free Europe – declared an undesirable organisation – on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent; and several Russian journalists working for Western outlets such as Bloomberg, Reuters and the Associated Press.
Beyond a possible swap, Gershkovich has become a valuable lever for lobbying the White House on all sorts of issues. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Thursday that Moscow has denied Gershkovich access to American diplomats in response to problems faced by Russian Foreign Ministry staff in the United States. “We are experiencing significant difficulties in organizing trips through the United States that are necessary for normal diplomatic and consular activities. Naturally, there are times when we give a mirror response,” the official said.
“Reporters Without Borders condemns the sham trial of journalist Evan Gershkovich,” the organization denounced through XTwitter’s new brand. “Targeting the international press is the next step in President Putin’s plan to achieve absolute control over Russia’s information space,” predicted the NGO, which places the Slavic country in 162nd place out of 180 in its press freedom index.
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