In his just about 15 months in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo jail, Evan Gershkovich has plowed thru Russian literary classics like “War and Peace,” and performed slow-moving chess via mail together with his father within the United States. He tries to stay himself in form all over the hourlong workout length he’s accepted on a daily basis.
Friends who correspond with him describe Mr. Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, as certain, robust and seldom discouraged, in spite of going through the respectable wrath of President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
“He may have ups and downs like everyone else, but he remains confident in himself, in his rightness,” mentioned Maria Borzunova, a Russian journalist and a pal of Mr. Gershkovich.
Mr. Gershkovich went on trial Wednesday, going through as much as two decades in jail on an espionage fee that he, his employer and the U.S. State Department vehemently deny.
He seemed in a court docket within the main commercial town of Yekaterinburg east of Moscow, the place he was once at first detained and the place he was once transferred lately after greater than a 12 months of imprisonment in Moscow.
Shortly sooner than the complaints began, newshounds filmed Mr. Gershkovich, together with his head lately shaved, status in a pitcher cage within the court docket. After a number of hours, the court docket scheduled the following consultation within the case for Aug. 13, according to the Russian state news agency Tass.
At the guts of Mr. Gershkovich’s ordeal is a void — the absence of any proof made public via the Russian government to beef up their declare that he was once a secret agent. Nor is any prone to emerge from his trial, which has been declared secret, with any observers barred from attending and his legal professionals prohibited from publicly revealing the rest they be told.
“We think that it is a sham trial based on fake charges, therefore the proceedings will be farcical,” Almar Latour, the writer of The Wall Street Journal, mentioned in an interview. It is not possible to are expecting how a tribulation will impact efforts to procure Mr. Gershkovich’s free up, he added.
In a remark on Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow mentioned officers had been on the courthouse and given temporary get entry to sooner than the complaints started. “We have been clear from the start that Evan has done nothing wrong and never should have been arrested in the first place,” the remark mentioned.
In Russian trials, conviction is in large part a foregone conclusion, particularly when — as on this case — the Kremlin has weighed in. The pass judgement on listening to the case has boasted to a neighborhood news outlet that during a occupation spanning many years, he has acquitted simply 4 defendants.
For greater than 5 years, Mr. Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen who grew up in New Jersey, roamed Russia as a reporter, rising to like the rustic, buddies say. The Foreign Ministry many times reissued his reporting credentials.
Now he could also be Kremlin fodder for a prisoner switch, as different imprisoned Americans had been lately. In hammering out such an trade, Russia insists that first a tribulation will have to be finished, ostensibly placing all sides on equivalent criminal footing.
“He’s a Kremlin chip, and they want to trade him,” mentioned Pjotr Sauer, a reporter for The Guardian newspaper and an in depth buddy of Mr. Gershkovich.
Mr. Gershkovich’s circle of relatives launched a remark on Wednesday, announcing: “These past 15 months have been extraordinarily painful for Evan and for our family. We miss our son and just want him home.”
“Evan is a journalist, and journalism is not a crime,” the remark added.
In April 2022, Russia traded Trevor Reed, an American convicted of assaulting Russian cops, for a Russian pilot imprisoned on cocaine trafficking fees within the United States. In the highest-profile contemporary case, in December 2022, the United States traded a infamous hands broker, Viktor Bout, for Brittney Griner, an American basketball superstar imprisoned for hashish ownership.
Asked in a tv interview in February about Mr. Gershkovich’s destiny, Mr. Putin mentioned negotiations had been underway, however he discussed in the hunt for additional concessions. He urged that he could be keen to business the reporter for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian sentenced to existence in jail in Germany for the brazen 2019 homicide of a Chechen former separatist fighter in a downtown Berlin park.
In Moscow, a senior Russian diplomat accused the United States of politicizing the trial. Speaking with journalists on Wednesday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov mentioned that Moscow had despatched “signals” to Washington “via relevant channels” about Mr. Gershkovich’s doable free up and that they must be regarded as critically, in keeping with Interfax, a Russian news company.
Mr. Gershkovich, 32, was once detained in Yekaterinburg, simply east of the Ural Mountains, in March 2023. Prosecutors, of their imprecise statements at the case, have mentioned that “under instructions from the C.I.A.” and “using painstaking conspiratorial methods,” he “was collecting secret information” a couple of manufacturing facility that produces tanks and different guns.
Mr. Gershkovich have been section of a coterie of younger Western and Russian newshounds based totally in Moscow. They took their function of explaining Russia to outsiders critically: repeatedly operating to reinforce their command of the language, touring broadly and sharing a standard weekend cottage in Peredelkino, a hamlet on Moscow’s outskirts referred to as a retreat for writers.
Mr. Gershkovich, raised via Soviet émigré oldsters, followed the identify Vanya, and relished Russian rituals like saunas and mushroom searching, along side sports activities together with football and snowboarding, buddies mentioned. His circle of relatives was once no longer to be had to remark at the trial, mentioned Ashley Huston, a Journal spokeswoman.
But the local weather for newshounds in Russia grew to become threatening with the rustic’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin handed draconian rules restricting how the battle might be described, and shuttered a lot of unbiased Russian shops. Mr. Gershkovich was once a few of the many newshounds who left the rustic, however he returned periodically to gauge how the warfare was once converting Russia.
Given that no Western correspondent have been charged with spying for the reason that Soviet generation, the possibility of imprisonment gave the impression troubling however far flung. Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest crossed a line, Ms. Borzunova mentioned, making it transparent that each one journalists, no longer simply Russians, had been in danger.
“We thought that official accreditation meant something,” she mentioned, “but it doesn’t.”
During his imprisonment, Mr. Gershkovich has met together with his legal professionals, and the U.S. ambassador, Lynne Tracey, has been allowed occasional visits. The State Department has declared him “wrongfully detained.”
His buddies swung into motion with a letter-writing marketing campaign to stay him hooked up to the out of doors global. They arranged the herculean job of translating them into Russian, to clean their approval via jail censors.
The effort has drawn greater than 5,000 letters from world wide written via everybody from grandmothers to grade college pupils. Many other folks detailed tough reports that they had persevered, mentioned Polina Ivanova, a reporter for The Financial Times.
Mr. Gershkovich’s buddies had been impressed in part via his persistently prime morale. In pretrial court docket hearings, status in a protecting cage for defendants, he generally greeted his fellow journalists with a smile and occasionally held his arms within the form of a center.
He has maintained a way of humor, suggesting in letters to buddies that jail gruel was once no worse than some of his adolescence foods. Mr. Gershkovich, who as soon as labored in a clerical function in The New York Times’s newsroom, have been a prepare dinner in short sooner than coming into journalism. His buddies get ready weekly care programs to complement the shortage of fruit and greens in Russian prisons, including sweet for his birthday.
He has returned the desire, ensuring to ship them birthday or vacation greetings. He asks buddies to replace him about their lives, even encouraging them to ship him separate letters describing the similar social occasions. “Like a real journalist, he wants different sources,” mentioned Mr. Sauer.
A voracious reader, Mr. Gershkovich scoured the jail library for some of the thick, foundational tomes of Russian literature, together with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate.” He additionally reads poetry and works about other folks at the back of bars.
Time in jail has polished his command of the language. “He had baby Russian when he arrived, there was no slang, now it is lyrical, beautiful,” mentioned Mr. Sauer.
From the instant Mr. Gershkovich was once arrested, his buddies mentioned they expected an extended ordeal, given the revel in of others.
Paul Whelan, an American charged with espionage, has been jailed since 2018. Marc Fogel, a U.S. citizen who taught on the Anglo-American School in Moscow, was once convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced in 2022 to fourteen years in a penal colony. Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and a twin Russian American citizen, faces a longer sentence on quite a lot of fees.
“We realized that this was going to be a marathon,” mentioned Ms. Borzunova, “that this was not going to be resolved quickly, that we had to prepare to tell this story for a long time, that he was a hostage of the Russian regime, that he was detained for his work.”