MOSCOW: US journalist Evan Gershkovich will face the start of a secret trial on spying charges in Russia today, more than a year following he became the first Western journalist since the Soviet era to be held on such allegation.
The Wall Street Journal correspondent, who along with his employer and the White House has refused the allegation, was detained in March 2023 while on a reporting tour to the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
Russian prosecutors accused US journalist of working for the CIA and “gathering secret information” about the Russians’ main tank producer company in the Urals, claims Washington said were fabricated.
The Kremlin has provided no public proof for the charges, saying only that he was arrested “red-handed”. The prosecution will take place in Yekaterinburg’s Sverdlovsk Regional Court, some 1,400 870 miles east of Moscow. If sentenced, US journalist could face up to 20 years in a penal colony.
Evan Gershkovich has spent almost 15 months in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison following his detention. The US State Department said the charge against him had “zero standing”, and the Wall Street Journal said he was detained for “simply doing his work”.
Washington has blamed Moscow of detonating its citizens on baseless allegations to use them as make a deal to secure the release of Russians sentenced to abroad. Moscow said last week, days after the prosecution date was announced, that it was waiting for a reply from Washington on ideas Russia had presented for a feasible prisoner swap.
Judge Andrei Mineyev will supervise over the court trail. They will be held secretly, as is typical for spying cases, but Russia has said the media will concisely be permitted to see US journalist in the courtroom before it starts. President Putin has indicated he wants to see US journalist freed as part of a prisoner exchange deal with the US, seeking the discharge of a Russian man imprisoned in Germany for killing an exiled Chechen separatist commander.
Biden, who greeted Gershkovich as brave for his reporting in Russia, has said his administration will work “every day” to take the reporter home. Gershkovich’s parents, who fled repression in the Soviet Union and settled in the US in the 1970s, told this year they were counting on a “very personal promise” from Biden.
“We know that he is blameless of what he is being blamed of,” his father Mikhail Gershkovich told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview in March. Russia detained other US citizens in its jails, including marine Paul Whelan, in jail for over five years on spying charges, and US-Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who was detained last year while visiting family.
Raised in New Jersey and a fluent Russian speaker, Gershkovich reported from Russia for six years and stayed there even as dozens of other Western journalists left in the wake of Moscow’s Ukraine offensive.
He moved to Russia in 2017 to work for small English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, where he delivered some of the outlet’s major stories on a shoe-string budget. In the job, he reported on how the conflict was disturbing ordinary Russians, speaking to the families of dead soldiers. His friends say he was determined to stay in Russia as long as possible.
There has been a major struggle to release Gershkovich, with many of his supporters praising his resilience while behind bars. US journalist’s family has also said it is staying strong. “He knows that we are doing well and we are strong,” Gershkovich’s mother Ella Milman told the Wall Street Journal in March. ” Evan Gershkovich set a high standard and we need to follow his example.” Ella Milman’s son “still worries about us” from prison, she said, adding that he was “exercising, meditating and reading a lot” in Moscow’s Lefortovo. “He is managing the best way he can.”
