In a closed trial with secret evidence, a Russian court on Friday convicted American journalist Evan Gershkovich of espionage – charges that the U.S. government said were wholly fabricated – and sentenced him to 16 years in prison, according to Russian state media
The prosecution had requested an 18-year prison term on Friday, close to the 20-year maximum. Gershkovich was the first American journalist arrested in Russia since the Cold War and his case has grave implications for press freedoms.
The trial proceeded with unusual swiftness – suggesting potential developments in negotiations for a prisoner exchange. Trials for espionage in Russia typically take months.
In Russia’s highly politicized legal system, where the courts routinely are used to jail journalists, democracy advocates, human rights activists and political opponents of the government, Gershkovich’s conviction had appeared inevitable since his arrest.
Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 seemed to mark a brazen new chapter in hostage diplomacy, by which the Kremlin details foreigners on baseless charges only to use them to negotiate exchanges for Russians convicted of serious crimes in the West.
Senior Russian and U.S. officials have said that talks about an exchange involving Gershkovich are underway but, according to Kremlin policy, would only proceed once the trial was over.
Gershkovich, his employer The Wall Street Journal and the State Department have all strongly denied the accusation that he was working for the CIA. His conviction was widely expected.
The 32-year-old, who was accredited as a journalist by Russia’s Foreign Ministry, was detained while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg and accused of spying. He pleaded not guilty.
A conviction would at least open the possibility that Gershkovich could be released if the United States can reach a deal with Russia.
The second day of the trial, at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, was moved forward to Thursday from Aug. 13 at the request of Gershkovich’s defense team, according to the court.
Russian prosecutors alleged that Gershkovich was operating on the orders of the CIA, gathering secret information about Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned machine-building factory in Nizhniy Tagil, about 87 miles southeast of Yekaterinburg, which manufactures tanks for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said last month that the case against Gershkovich was “not about evidence, procedural norms, or the rule of law. It is about the Kremlin using American citizens to achieve its political objectives.”
Fueling the sense that the result was a political inevitability, senior Russian officials immediately denounced the journalist after his arrest in March last year. Within hours, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had proclaimed that his work in Yekaterinburg had “nothing to do with journalism” and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted that Gershkovich had been “caught red-handed.” Neither offered evidence.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia had “irrefutable evidence” that the reporter had spied and claimed that the use of journalists as spies “at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, is a tradition.” But he confirmed that Russian and U.S. intelligence services were in contact on the possibility of an exchange.
In February, President Vladimir Putin indicated he would be willing to exchange Gershkovich for a “patriot” who had “eliminated a Russian bandit” in a European capital, an apparent reference to Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, associated with Russia’s Federal Security Service. Krasikov was convicted of murder in Germany for fatally shooting a former Chechen rebel commander, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019.
Last month, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia was awaiting a response from Washington to its exchange offer. He said “the ball is in the United States’ court. We are waiting for their response to the ideas that were presented to them.”
Ryabkov said the Kremlin had “repeatedly emphasized that the United States” should “seriously consider the signals” Moscow had sent to Washington about possible deals but did not detail the proposals.
“I understand that the Americans are probably not happy with something in these ideas. That’s their problem,” he said.
Gershkovich’s conviction is likely to have a further chilling effect on the work of foreign journalists in Russia. Many media organizations pulled their correspondents out of Russia after his arrest in March last year.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist arrested in Russia for alleged spying since 1986, during the Cold War, when Nicholas Daniloff, a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, was detained by the Soviet security service. Daniloff was held for 13 days before being freed without facing trial in exchange for Gennadi Zakharov, who had been arrested by the FBI in New York for spying in a sting operation.
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The United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions this month called on Russia to free Gershkovich without a trial and to pay him compensation. It concluded that, “There is a striking lack of any factual or legal substantiation provided by the authorities of the Russian Federation for the espionage charges” against him.
His arrest was “designed to punish his reporting” on Russia’s war against Ukraine, “lacked a legal basis and is arbitrary,” the U.N. working group said.
Associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in jail in Russia in February, said that there was nearly an agreement that month on a deal exchanging Krasikov for Navalny and two Americans.
That exchange probably would have involved Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year jail term in Russia after being convicted in 2020 of spying. The State Department has designated Gershkovich and Whelan as wrongly detained.
One of Navalny’s closest associates, Maria Pevchikh, reported that the prisoner exchange talks were in their final stages on Feb. 15, the day before Navalny was reported dead. Pevchikh has alleged that Putin decided to have Navalny killed to sabotage the deal, rather than free him.
The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny’s death. In March, Putin confirmed that a person had put a deal on exchanging Navalny to him shortly before he died, adding that he immediately agreed, on condition that Navalny never return to Russia.
“I agreed under one condition: we swap him, and he doesn’t come back. But such is life,” said Putin. “When things like that happen you cannot do anything about it. That’s life,” he said referring to Navalny’s death.
Whelan, 54, has spent more than five and a half years in prison in Russia, having been overlooked in two previous exchange deals.
The American WNBA star Brittney Griner, convicted in Moscow of drug smuggling in August 2022, was freed in an exchange that December for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms trafficker.
Former Marine Trevor Reed, convicted of assaulting a police officer, was freed in April 2022 in exchange for Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who had been jailed in the United States for drug smuggling.