On Friday (July 7), American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for Wall Street Journal newspaper, marked 100 days in detention in Russia. He has been facing charges of espionage, a crime that carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, on Friday, told reporters that the US has held discussions with Russia in a bid to bring Gershkovich home, but there isn’t any “clear pathway” to his release.
Who is Evan Gershkovich?
The son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union during the Cold War for the US, 31-year-old Gershkovich grew up speaking Russian at home in Princeton, New Jersey. After he graduated from the prestigious Bowdoin College in Maine, he began working with The New York Times in 2016 and went on to join The Moscow Times and then Agence France-Presse news agency, before he became a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Gershkovich started to cover Russia for WSJ just a month before the country invaded Ukraine last year.
Why was Gershkovich arrested?
The Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s top security agency and successor to the KGB, on March 29 announced that it had arrested Gershkovich from the city of Yekaterinburg, located 1,400km east of Moscow, on the charges of spying.
The agency said it had “stopped the illegal activities of US citizen Gershkovich Evan, born in 1991, a correspondent of the Moscow bureau of the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, accredited at the Russian foreign ministry, who is suspected of spying in the interests of the American government”.
The FSB also claimed that the reporter had been tasked “by the American side” with collecting information about “the activities of one of the enterprises of the military defence complex”. The details of the facility concerned still remain unclear as the agency has refused to provide its name or exact location or any evidence of Gershkovich’s alleged actions.
Quoting Russian news website Meduza, based in Latvia, The Independent reported that “the journalist had reportedly been visiting Nizhny Tagil, the site of Russian battle tank producer Uralvagonzavod… Dozens of companies producing weapons are based in the city.”
Following his arrest, Gershkovich was brought back to Moscow and charged with espionage. On June 22, a Moscow court rejected an appeal to free the journalist, who is being held at Lefortovo prison, where the KGB formerly held dissidents. Th court also upheld a ruling to keep him in custody until August 30. Notably, Gershkovich is the first Western journalist to be jailed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
How has the US responded?
President Joe Biden called Russia’s treatment of Gershkovich “totally illegal” and urged the country to “let him go”. Just days after the reporter’s detention, the US officially designated him as wrongfully detained, saying the spy charges were bogus and the case was political. Russia, however, has maintained that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed” and his activities in Yekaterinburg were “not related to journalism”.
So far, US ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy has been allowed to meet the reporter twice only — the latest meeting took place on July 3. After her second visit to Gershkovich, the US State Department said: “Ambassador Tracy reports that Mr Gershkovich is in good health and remains strong, despite his circumstances”.
Meanwhile, WSJ, in a statement, said it was “deeply concerned” for its employee’s safety and that it “vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter”.
What are the chances of Gershkovich coming back?
As of now, it’s hard to say. The Kremlin earlier this week indicated that it is open to arranging a new prisoner swap in the near future that could involve Gershkovich. But it insisted that such negotiations must be held out of public sight.
“I do not want to give false hope,” Sullivan told reporters. “What the Kremlin said earlier this week is correct. There have been discussions. But those discussions have not produced a clear pathway to a resolution, and so I cannot stand here today and tell you that we have a clear answer to how we are going to get Evan home.”
How has Russia cracked down on news outlets after the invasion of Ukraine?
Soon after the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022, the government of President Vladimir Putin intensified action against independent news media and journalists. It passed a law against spreading “false information” about the invasion and blocked access to Facebook and major foreign news outlets.
Russia also blocked the websites of the Voice of America, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Most recently, in January, it declared the independent news outlet Meduza an “undesirable organisation”, and outlawed the site’s operation in the country.