In early 2022, Evan Gershkovich, Wall Street Journal journalist wrote on social media that “reporting on Russia is now also a common practice of seeing people you know get locked up for years.”
A year later, he was the one who was locked up: arrested in March 2023 on espionage charges that his employer and the US government have denounced as trumped-up. On Friday I was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) alleged that the 32-year-old journalist was acting on US orders to collect state secrets, but provided no evidence to support the accusation. Washington designated him as unjustly detained.
The arrest of Gershkovich, the first American journalist detained on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War, came as a surprise, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on free speech after the invasion of Ukraine. in February 2022.
“It was accredited by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There was nothing to suggest this was going to happen,” Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, said in an interview in March.
Since the invasion, Russian authorities have detained several US citizens and other Westerners, and Gershkovich knew the risks, said Washington Post correspondent and friend Francesca Ebel.
After his arrest, he knew “from the beginning that this was going to take a long time,” he said.
Since his arrest, Gershkovich has appeared more than a dozen times in Russian courts: first in Moscow, where he was held in the famous Lefortovo prisonand then at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains.
His pretrial appearances became almost formulaic, as Gershkovich was led in handcuffs again and again from a prison van to the defendants’ glass cage. They offered his family and friends a painful reminder of his detention, but also the opportunity to see him.
“It’s always a mixed feeling. I’m happy to see him and that he’s okay, but it’s a reminder that he’s not with us. We want him home,” Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, told The Associated Press in an interview in March.
Although Gershkovich was often seen smiling in brief appearances, friends and family said he found it difficult to face a wall of cameras pointed at him as if he were an animal in a zoo.
When his trial began behind closed doors on June 26, Gershkovich remained in the defendants’ cage with his head shaved while the media was briefly allowed into the courtroom.
It was the last time Gershkovich’s friends and family were able to see him until his sentencing.
Now that he has been found guilty, there will likely be few opportunities to see him, and his friends and family can now only hope for his release through a prisoner exchange.
But no one knows when that might be.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday at the United Nations that discussions about a swap involving Gershkovich are ongoing. Russia had previously flagged the possibility of a swap but said a verdict had to be reached first. Even now, any such deal could take months or years.
The Journal’s Tucker has said he is “optimistic that 2024 will be the year Evan is released, but I’m also realistic,” noting that any trade talks are taking place in a “very feverish” context. .
Gershkovich, the son of Soviet emigrants who settled in New Jersey, spoke fluent Russian and moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
“He loved it,” Milman said of his son’s life in Moscow.
He dedicated himself to the work and became close friends with other reporters. They went to traditional Russian saunas, cycled around Moscow or had barbecues in the countryside.
Now, friends and family say Gershkovich relies on his sense of humor to get him through the day.
In Lefortovo, Gershkovich was not allowed phone calls and woke up “every morning to the same gray prison wall,” said her friend, Polina Ivanova of the Financial Times.
He was allowed out of his cell for one hour a day for exercise and spent the rest of his time primarily reading and writing letters.
Mikhail Gershkovich wrote to his son about chess strategy, and Gershkovich attempted to teach the game to his cellmate. They also talked about artificial intelligence because he “wants to be up to date when he returns,” his father said.
From behind bars, he organized gifts for friends on their birthdays and sent flowers to important women in his life for International Women’s Day earlier this month.
“He’s telling people not to be scared,” Milman said, noting that his son is a source of great pride for the family.
But with no end in sight to their detention, the strain on them is evident.
Every day, Milman said, “I wake up and look at the clock.”
“I think about whether it’s past his lunch break and his bedtime,” she said. “It’s very hard. It’s taking its toll.”
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