Russia sentences US journalist Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison for espionage

Russian justice on Friday sentenced American Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on charges of espionage for allegedly gathering secret information about the country’s military industry.

Gershkovich, who was arrested in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Ural Mountains, is the first American reporter to be prosecuted for espionage in Russia since the Cold War.

During the hearing in the Sverdlovsk regional court, the prosecution requested 18 years in a maximum security prison.

The trial was unusually quick, consisting of just three hearings, two of them this week, which the press has directly linked to Washington’s interest in shortening the deadlines for its future exchange for a Russian prisoner.

In fact, yesterday’s and today’s hearings, brought forward at the request of the defense, were to have been held in mid-August.

Gershkovich, who has been behind bars for 477 days, has not admitted his guilt and maintains, as does his newspaper, that he was merely fulfilling his professional duty when he was arrested in March 2023 in Yekaterinburg.

The 32-year-old journalist received the same sentence as Paul Whelan, the former US Marine also sentenced for espionage in June 2020.

The US Embassy in Moscow said in X that the Russian justice system has not presented evidence to justify the detention of its citizen and denounced the persecution of dissidents and journalists in Russia.

“Despite what Russian authorities claim, Evan is a journalist,” he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Moscow has “irrefutable evidence” of Gershkovich’s spying activities, who was caught “red-handed,” according to Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin.

He also confirmed that the special services of Russia and the United States are in contact to “see if someone can be exchanged for someone else.”

In December 2022, American basketball player Brittney Griner was exchanged for the ‘Merchant of Death’, Russian arms dealer Victor But.

The last arrest of an American journalist for espionage took place in 1986, at the height of Perestroika, and involved Nicholas Daniloff (US News & World Report), who was arrested by the KGB and exchanged three weeks later for a Soviet prisoner.

Gershkovich, the son of Soviet emigrants who settled in the United States in 1979, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in March 2023 while reporting for The Wall Street Journal, after which he was formally charged with espionage by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

According to the indictment, he collected secret information in the Sverdlovsk region on the activities of the JSC NPK Uralvagonzavod defense company, which produces tanks and other heavy weapons.