In early 2022, Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote on social media that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”
In early 2022, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich wrote on social media that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”
A year later, he was the one locked up — arrested in March 2023 on charges of spying that his employer and the U.S. government have denounced as fabricated. On Friday, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, alleged the 32-year-old journalist was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to support the accusation. Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.
The arrest of Gershkovich — the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War — came as a shock, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“He was accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry. There was nothing to suggest that this was going to happen,” said Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief in an interview in March.
Since the invasion, Russian authorities have detained several U.S. nationals and other Westerners, and Gershkovich knew the risks, said correspondent and friend Francesca Ebel.
After his arrest, he knew “right from the very start that this was going to take a long time,” she said.
Since his detention, Gershkovich has appeared more than a dozen times in Russian courtrooms — first in Moscow, where he was held at the notorious Lefortovo Prison, and then at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
