The unusually fast pace of the trial suggests that negotiations for a prisoner swap may be underway – espionage trials in Russia typically take several months.
Because the trial and arguments were kept secret, the evidence against Gershkovich was not subjected to public scrutiny and may never be made public.
In Russia’s highly politicized legal system, where courts routinely jail journalists, democracy defenders, human rights activists and political opponents of the government, Gershkovich’s conviction had seemed inevitable since his arrest, but supporters and friends still expressed shock.
“Russia has sentenced an innocent man to 16 years in a maximum security prison,” Piotr Sauer, a Guardian correspondent and close friend of Gershkovich’s, wrote on Twitter. “Words cannot describe this farce. Let’s get Evan out of there.”
In a joint statement, Wall Street Journal Publisher Almar Latour and Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker called for an end to Gershkovich’s ordeal following his wrongful arrest last March.
“Evan was wrongfully detained, separated from his family and friends, banned from reporting and served 478 days in prison for carrying out his duties as a journalist before being falsely convicted of this disgrace,” the statement said. “We will continue to do all we can to seek Evan’s release and support his family.”
A video released by Russian news outlet Bedemosti shows Gershkovich, wearing a black T-shirt and with a shaved head, standing inside a glass box in the courtroom as the judge rapidly reads out the verdict, guilty verdict and sentence.
Journalists were only allowed inside at the beginning, before the evidence was presented, and at the end, when the guilty verdict and sentence were read, with armed guards in black face masks standing nearby.
Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 appears to have marked the beginning of a bold new chapter in hostage diplomacy, in which the Kremlin will accuse foreigners of detailed, unfounded charges only to use them in exchange negotiations for Russians convicted of serious crimes in the West.
Senior Russian and U.S. officials have said talks are underway over a swap for Gershkovich but that according to Kremlin policy, the talks could only proceed once the trial is over.
Mr Gershkovich, his employer, The Wall Street Journal, and the State Department all strongly deny the charge that he worked for the CIA. His conviction was widely expected.
The 32-year-old, accredited as a journalist by the Russian Foreign Ministry, was detained during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg and accused of espionage – a charge he has pleaded not guilty to.
A guilty verdict would at least open the door to Gershkovich’s release if the U.S. could reach a deal with Russia.
The second day of the trial at Yekaterinburg’s Sverdlovsk Regional Court was brought forward from August 13 to Thursday at the request of Gershkovich’s defense team, the court said.
Russian prosecutors alleged that Mr. Gershkovich was acting at the behest of the CIA to gather secret information about Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned machine-building plant in Nizhny Tagil, about 87 miles southeast of Yekaterinburg, which makes tanks for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that the hearing was held behind closed doors due to the sensitivity of the case, but Russian legal rights activists have reported a dramatic increase in the number of closed-door cases since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“As you know, the charges relate to espionage,” Peskov said. “So this is a very sensitive area, which is why the judge chose the closed-door format,” Peskov said in a call with reporters. He declined to comment on the possible exchange.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said last month that the case against Gershkovich “is not about evidence, procedural norms or the rule of law. It is about the Kremlin’s attempt to use American citizens to achieve its own political ends.”
Russian government officials increasingly saw the outcome as politically inevitable shortly after Gershkovich’s arrest last March. Hours later, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared that Gershkovich’s activities in Yekaterinburg had “nothing to do with journalism,” while Kremlin spokesman Peskov claimed that Gershkovich had been “caught red-handed.” Neither offered any evidence.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday that Russia had “irrefutable evidence” that the reporters had engaged in espionage and argued that using journalists as spies is “a tradition, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world,” but acknowledged that Russian and U.S. intelligence agencies were in contact about a possible exchange.
In February, President Vladimir Putin suggested he was willing to trade Gershkovich for a “patriot” who would “kill a Russian bandit” in a European capital — an apparent reference to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin with ties to the Russian Federal Security Service who was convicted in Germany of shooting dead 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 waiting for Washington’s response to the proposed swap. “The ball is in the U.S.’s court. We are waiting for their reaction to the ideas presented to them,” he said.
Ryabkov said the Russian government “repeatedly stressed” that the United States should “seriously consider the signals regarding a possible deal that Russia has sent to Washington,” but did not provide details of the proposal.
“I understand that the American people are probably unhappy with some of these ideas. That’s their problem,” he said.
Gershkovich’s conviction could have a further chilling effect on the work of foreign journalists in Russia, after many media organisations withdrew their correspondents from the country following his arrest in March last year.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist to be arrested in Russia on espionage charges since U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Danilov was detained by Soviet security services during the Cold War in 1986. After 13 days in custody, Danilov was released without trial in exchange for Gennady Zakharov, who had been arrested in New York on espionage charges in an FBI sting operation.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on Russia this month to release Gershkovich without trial and pay compensation, concluding that “the Russian authorities have not presented any factual or legal evidence to substantiate the espionage charges against him.”
The UN Working Group said his arrest was “designed to punish his reporting” about Russia’s war in Ukraine and was “arbitrary and lacking legal basis.”
A source close to Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader who died in a Russian prison in February, said a deal to swap Krasikov for Navalny and two Americans was close to being agreed that month.
The exchange likely involved Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, an American who was convicted of espionage in 2020 and is serving a 16-year prison sentence in Russia. The State Department has found that Gershkovich and Whelan are being wrongfully detained.
Maria Pevchik, a close aide to Navalny, reported that prisoner exchange negotiations were in the final stages on February 15, the day before Navalny’s death was reported. Pevchik claims that Putin decided to kill Navalny to sabotage the deal rather than release him.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Navalny’s death. Putin acknowledged in March that someone had offered him a deal to swap him for Navalny shortly before his death, adding that he quickly agreed on the condition that Navalny never return to Russia.
“I agreed on one condition: I will exchange him, and he will not come back. But that’s life,” Putin said. “When these things happen, you can’t do anything about it. That’s life,” he said, referring to Navalny’s death.
Whelan, 54, was overlooked in two previous swap deals and has spent more than five and a half years in a Russian prison.
American WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was convicted of drug smuggling in Moscow in August 2022, was released in exchange for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms trafficker in December of the same year.
Trevor Reed, a former Marine convicted of assaulting a police officer, was released in April 2022 in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot who was imprisoned in the United States on drug smuggling charges.
Friends and family said Gershkovich, the son of Soviet defectors, fell in love with Russia after moving there in 2017 to work for the Moscow Times, a leading local publication that withdrew from the country after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He later worked for the AFP news agency before joining The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau in early 2022.
He grew up eating his mother, Ella Millman’s, home-cooked Russian food and watching classic Soviet-era cartoons, and friends and colleagues describe his open, friendly demeanor, passion for journalism and unerring ability to connect with the people he met.
Throughout his arrest, approximately 15 months in detention, and trial, The Wall Street Journal ran a campaign to keep his story in the public eye, promoting the hashtag “#FreeEvan,” hosting events like “#CookForEvan,” encouraging his supporters to cook his favorite dishes, and telling his story as a cooking enthusiast and great cook who loved to entertain friends.
