Evan Gershkovich, a US Wall Street Journal reporter who US media reports said was part of a prisoner deal with Russia, is serving a 16-year sentence after an espionage trial condemned by the United States as a Kremlin ploy to secure detainees swaps.
The 32-year-old son of Soviet emigres had reported from Russia for six years and carried on visiting the country even after dozens of other Western journalists left following Moscow’s 2022 Ukraine offensive.
Russia’s critics say his arrest for spying in March 2023 showed the Kremlin was prepared to go further than ever before in what President Vladimir Putin has called a “hybrid war” with the West.
Gershkovich, his employer and the White House rejected the spying allegations — the first levelled against a Western reporter in Russia since the Soviet era — and called the trial a “sham”.
Before his trial started in June, he was held for 15 months in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.
His case was heard by a closed military court in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, where he was arrested.
At the sentencing on July 20, after a trial with just three hearings, Gershkovich stood in a glass cage for defendants at the side of the court in dark trousers and a dark T-Shirt.
He did not appear to react when the judge read the verdict and sentence.
Prosecutors asked for 18 years in jail and a long term seemed inevitable.
Russia provided no public evidence for the charges, saying only that Gershkovich spied on a tank factory in the Urals region and was working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Wall Street Journal dismissed the accusation as bogus, saying he was arrested for “simply doing his job”.
Moscow and Washington have both said they are open to exchanging the reporter in a deal, but neither has given clues on when that might happen.
– ‘You love this country’ –
Raised in New Jersey, Gershkovich is a fluent Russian speaker and avid cook.
He arrived in Russia in 2017 to work for the English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, and quickly produced some of the outlet’s biggest stories on a shoestring budget.
He then worked for AFP, reporting on forest fires in Siberia, a crackdown on the opposition and Moscow downplaying the effects of the Covid pandemic.
Weeks before the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive, he became Moscow correspondent with The Wall Street Journal.
In that role, he reported extensively on how ordinary Russians experienced the Ukraine conflict, speaking to the families of dead soldiers.
Gershkovich’s parents fled from repression and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
His mother, Ella Milman, told AFP this year she was initially happy he made a life for himself in a country that she and his father had fled.
“It was amazing,” she said. “I told him I left this country and you love this country — and what a change.”
– ‘Still standing strong’ –
“We never anticipated this situation happening to our son and brother,” the Gershkovich family said in a letter published by The Wall Street Journal this year.
“But despite this long battle, we are still standing strong,” they added.
Gershkovich himself, too, appears to have preserved his playful sense of humour.
In a first hand-written letter out of jail to his parents, he wrote:
“Mom, you unfortunately, for better or worse, prepared me well for jail food.”
The US ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, repeatedly said that Gershkovich is in “good spirits” when she visited him in jail in Moscow ahead of the trial.
At Lefortovo, an antiquated prison that housed victims of Joseph Stalin’s repression, he shared a small cell with another inmate.
– ‘Deeply cared’ –
He said he got an hour-long walk in a small prison yard every day, tried to stay fit through exercise, and relied on fruit and vegetables sent by friends to supplement the meagre prison diet.
Gershkovich had been keen to carry on reporting from Russia despite an exodus of Western and Russian independent press when the Kremlin launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Friends say his character — open, gregarious and extremely sociable — made Gershkovich’s reporting even better.
He “could make any source comfortable, because they always felt he deeply cared about the story”, close friend Pjotr Sauer said.
His parents said they were counting on a “very personal” promise from US President Joe Biden to bring him home.
“For me it’s devastating to know how much he’s missed, how much time he’s lost,” his sister Danielle told AFP. “I miss him more and more every day.”
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