American journalist Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal will soon stand trial in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on charges of spying for the CIA, Russian authorities said Thursday, even as they continued to disclose no evidence to support the accusations.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting assignment for the Journal in Yekaterinburg and accused of espionage by the Federal Security Service, or FSB. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Gershkovich, the Journal and U.S. officials repeatedly have rejected the charges as baseless.
Russian prosecutors, announcing that they had finalized an indictment, said in a statement that they had “established and documented” that Gershkovich “collected secret information” about the Uralvagonzavod military factory in the Sverdlovsk region while “on assignment from the CIA.”
It was the first time Russian authorities revealed any details about the case they intend to build against him, and they still did not reveal any evidence to justify the allegations. All pretrial hearings against Gershkovich have been held behind closed doors.
The State Department has declared him and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018 on similar charges, to be wrongfully detained, a designation that commits the federal government to work for their release.
In a Thursday statement, the Journal and its publisher, Dow Jones, once again rejected the charges and demanded Gershkovich’s immediate release, saying they “expect the U.S. government to redouble efforts.”
“Evan Gershkovich is facing a false and baseless charge,” they said in the statement. “Russia’s latest move toward a sham trial is, while expected, deeply disappointing and still no less outrageous. Evan has spent 441 days wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for simply doing his job. Evan is a journalist. The Russian regime’s smearing of Evan is repugnant, disgusting and based on calculated and transparent lies. Journalism is not a crime.”
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday the charges against Gershkovich “are false and the Russian government knows that they are false.”
“We have been clear from the start that Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place,” Miller said.
Gershkovich’s arrest marked the first time an American journalist had been accused of espionage in Russia since the Cold War. The Kremlin has signaled that it is open to the possibility of trading Gershkovich for Russian nationals jailed abroad once a verdict is delivered.
In February, President Vladimir Putin told American right-wing host Tucker Carlson in his first interview with a Western media figure since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that “an agreement can be reached” with the United States to release Gershkovich.
Putin made a thinly veiled reference to Vadim Krasikov, an FSB agent currently serving a life sentence in Germany after being convicted of murdering a Georgian military officer, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, in the Berlin park Kleiner Tiergarten in 2019.
“Listen, I’ll tell you: sitting in one country, a country that is an ally of the United States, is a man who, for patriotic reasons, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals,” Putin said.
Other officials have confirmed initial discussions had taken place about an exchange that would have involved Gershkovich, Krasikov and Alexei Navalny, the Russian political opposition figure who died suddenly in an Arctic prison in February. Navalny’s family and associates said he was killed to prevent such an exchange from taking place.
Navalny had recovered at a Berlin hospital after he was nearly assassinated with a chemical weapon in Russia in 2020, and freeing him was seen as a way to persuade Germany to release Krasikov.
U.S. officials and analysts have accused Russia of using Americans as bargaining chips to win the release of Russians convicted in the West of serious crimes.
The arrests in recent months of dual U.S.-Russian citizens – Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter with U.S.-government-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Ksenia Karelina, a spa worker who had been living in California – brought the number of Americans in Russian custody to at least six.
Those detentions have fueled speculation that Russia is seeking to gain more leverage. Moscow denies that the arrests are politically motivated and insists each detainee has violated Russian law.
In February 2022, just before the invasion of Ukraine, the American WNBA star Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia for possessing less than a gram of hash oil and charged with drug smuggling. She spent nearly 10 months in prison in Russia before being exchanged for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was being held in a U.S. federal prison.
Former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, meanwhile, was swapped for convicted drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko in April 2022.
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Michael Birnbaum and Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
(c) Washington Post
