His family wants to keep hope and promises to “continue to [se] beat”. American President Joe Biden assures “work tirelessly” to obtain his release: American journalist Evan Gershkovich has been detained in Russia for a year now for espionage. Correspondent of Wall Street Journal, the 32-year-old man was arrested on March 29, 2023 by the FSB during a report. On Tuesday, Russian justice once again extended his pre-trial detention until June 30, pending a possible trial or an exchange of prisoners between Russia and the United States.
The first journalist accused of espionage since the fall of the Soviet Union, he rejects these accusations as do the United States, his newspaper and those close to him. Joe Biden denounced on Friday “Russia’s scandalous attempts to use Americans as bargaining chips.”
Unlike many American journalists who left Russia in the wake of the assault on Ukraine in February 2022, Evan Gershkovich chose to continue his reporting. Committed to describing the way Russians experienced the conflict, he spoke with relatives of killed soldiers, critics of Vladimir Putin, and looked into the effects of sanctions on the Russian economy.
Sensitive subjects
During his arrest in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, he appeared to be working on sensitive subjects: the Russian arms industry and the Wagner paramilitary group. But Russia never publicly provided any evidence and the entire procedure was classified secret. The Kremlin simply claimed that he had been caught “in the act” of spying.
In recent years, the journalist, originally from New Jersey, near New York, has distinguished himself by his determination to tell the story of Russia, the country of his roots whose rules and superstitions he knows. His parents, Soviet Jews who fled the USSR at the end of the 1970s, had instilled them in him. A graduate of English and philosophy, Evan Gershkovich chose to take the opposite path and settle in Russia. He worked for Moscow Timesthe main English-speaking media in Moscow, then for the AFP, before joining the Wall Street Journal.
Repression of journalists
Russia has one of the lowest scores in Reporters Without Borders’ 2023 World Press Freedom Index, ranking 164 out of 180. “No journalist is safe from prosecution potentially serious legal system, on the basis of vaguely worded repressive laws, often passed quickly”, notes the NGO on his website.
A Russian court on Thursday March 28 sentenced a Russian journalist to two years in prison for publishing messages denouncing the attack on the Kremlin in Ukraine, while a wave of arrests hit six journalists from independent media that same week. Reporters Without Borders reacted to this wave of arrests by denouncing a “blatant attempt to silence the last independent media in Russia.”