Facts: Evan Gershkovich
Evan Gershkovich, born in 1991, is an American journalist who has been reporting from and about Russia since 2017.
His parents fled separately to the United States from the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. They met in Detroit, Michigan and later moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where the couple’s two children grew up.
When Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Yekaterinburg on March 29, he was working for the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal. He has previously worked for The New York Times, The Moscow Times and the AFP news agency.
After his arrest, he was remanded in custody by a Moscow court until May 29. He is reportedly being held in Lefortovo prison awaiting trial.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry claims he was caught “in the act” trying to get hold of classified information about the Russian military or military facilities. According to media reports, he was working on an article about the paramilitary Wagner group when he was arrested.
The Wall Street Journal and the White House have denied the allegations against Gershkovich.
According to The New York Times, which refers to the Russian news agency Interfax, negotiations on the American’s case will be held in a Moscow court on Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested at the end of March in Yekaterinburg, Russia, accused of spying on behalf of the United States. He faces 20 years in prison if convicted.
During a press conference in Washington, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently warned journalists not to “ever set foot” in Russia over Gershkovich’s fate.
Hard austerity
“Reporting on Russia now also means a regular exercise in seeing people you know locked up for years,” wrote the reporter himself on Twitter last year, in connection with the arrest of Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin.
Yashin was later sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for condemning Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine on his YouTube channel.
Evan Gershkovich is escorted from a courtroom into a vehicle in Moscow on March 30.
Gershkovich’s case is a reflection of Russia’s ever-harder tightening of press freedom, according to observers. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has introduced a series of strict laws that, among other things, criminalize the dissemination of “false” information about Russia’s activities in Ukraine and discrediting the military.
Sources: Putin approved
The arrest of the WSJ reporter further tightens the thumbs for the few foreign journalists still left in the country, writes the news channel CNN.
According to sources to Bloomberg Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have personally approved the FSB security service’s plans to arrest the 31-year-old reporter in March. The president’s alleged endorsement reflects the growing influence enjoyed by the most hard-line politicians within the Kremlin headquarters, Bloomberg’s sources said.
Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be arrested for espionage in Russia since the days of the Cold War. The arrest has been met with strong condemnation from the international community.
This weekend, he was reported for the first time since his arrest to have been in contact by letter with his family in the United States.