The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich has spent 100 days in Russian detention on charges of espionage which he and his newspaper have strongly denied. Gershkovich, 31, was detained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) on March 29 when he was on assignment in the Ural Mountains and has since been held at Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, where inmates are kept in near-total isolation.
Gershkovich’s parents, Ella and Mikhail, fled the Soviet Union separately in the late 1970s and met in New York City in 1979. They later moved to Princeton, NJ, where Evan and his sister grew up speaking Russian at home.
From 2016 to 2022, Gershkovich worked in Russia for The New York Times, The Moscow Times, and Agence France-Presse, before being hired by The Wall Street Journal in January 2022. At the time of his arrest, he was covering the war in Ukraine for the WSJ.
Gershkovich was the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the Cold War. According to NPR, a court, operating in closed session, ordered Gershkovich to be remanded until the end of May while investigations were ongoing. According to Kommersant, he was then transferred to Lefortovo prison to await trial. A conviction for espionage could carry a sentence of 20 years.
A Russian court rejected Gershkovich’s on April 18. The court rejected his lawyers’ offer to free him on a 50-million-ruble ($614,000) bail or place him under house arrest.
The Kremlin said last Tuesday that there had been “certain contacts” with the US regarding Gershkovich after US Ambassador Lynne Tracy’s visited him in prison on Monday.
Russian state media suggested a prisoners’ exchange was in the works since Russian consular officials in the US on Monday were allowed to visit Vladimir Dunaev, an alleged cybercriminal who had been extradited from South Korea and is detained in the US.
President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “There are certain contacts on this matter but we do not want them made public at all. They should take place and continue in total silence.”
Total silence is the most preferred kind of silence in Russia.
