In early 2022, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich posted on social media that “reporting on Russia now means routinely watching someone you know get locked up for years.”
A year later, he was in prison. In March 2023, he was arrested on espionage charges that his employers and the U.S. government have called trumped up. On Friday, he was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed the 32-year-old journalist was acting on US orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to support the claim. Washington found he had been unlawfully detained.
Russia had enacted laws to increasingly repress free speech after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but the arrest of Gershkovich, the first American journalist to be held on espionage charges since Nicholas Danilov was arrested in 1986 at the height of the Cold War, came as a shock.
“He was sanctioned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. There was nothing to suggest anything like this was going to happen,” Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, said in a March interview.
Since the invasion, Russian authorities have detained several Americans and other Western nationals, and Mr. Gershkovich was aware of the risks, said Francesca Ebel, a Washington Post correspondent and friend.
After his arrest, she said he “knew from the beginning that this was going to take a long time.”
Since his detention, Gershkovich has appeared in Russian courts more than 10 times, first in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison and then at the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in the Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg.
Gershkovich’s pretrial appearance was largely routine, with him being handcuffed and led repeatedly from a jail van to a glass prison cage, providing a painful reminder of his detention and a chance to see him for his family and friends.
“It’s always a mixed emotion. I’m happy to see my son and I’m glad he’s OK, but I’m also reminded that he’s not with us. I want him to be home,” Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Millman, told The Associated Press in an interview in March.
Though Gershkovich was often smiling during his brief appearance, friends and family said it was difficult for him to have the cameras trained on him like he was a zoo animal.
When the closed-door trial began on June 26, reporters were briefly allowed inside the courtroom and Gershkovich, with his head shaved, stood in the defendant’s cage.
It was the last time Gershkovich’s friends and family were able to see him before his guilty verdict.
Now that he has been convicted, chances of ever seeing him are slim to none, and his friends and family can only hope for his release through a prisoner swap.
But no one knows when that will be.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the United Nations on Wednesday that talks to replace Gershkovich were underway. Russia has previously floated the possibility of a replacement but said a verdict must be issued first. Even now, any such agreement could take months or even years.
“We’re optimistic that Evan will be released in 2024, but we’re also realistic,” The Wall Street Journal’s Tucker said, noting that exchange talks are taking place in a “very heated” environment.
The son of Soviet immigrants who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times before being hired by The Wall Street Journal in 2022.
“My son absolutely loved living in Moscow,” Millman said of his son’s life there.
He threw himself into his work and became close friends with other journalists, with whom he went to traditional Russian saunas, cycled around Moscow and had barbecues in the countryside.
Now, friends and family say Gershkovich relies on her sense of humor to get through each day.
In Lefortovo prison, Gershkovich was banned from using the phone and “woke up every morning in front of the same grey prison walls,” his friend Polina Ivanova told the Financial Times.
He was allowed out of his cell for one hour a day for exercise, and spent the rest of the time mainly reading and writing letters.
Mikhail Gershkovich wrote his son letters about chess strategies and tried to teach his cellmate the game, and the two also discussed artificial intelligence because “he wants to be up to date when he returns,” his father said.
While in prison, he gave gifts to friends on their birthdays and gave flowers to important women in his life on International Women’s Day earlier this month.
“He’s telling people not to panic,” Millman said, noting that his son is a great source of pride for the family.
But with no end to their detention in sight, the strain is on them.
“Every day I wake up and I look at the clock,” Millman said.
“I find myself wondering if my son’s lunchtime or bedtime has passed,” she said. “It’s very difficult. It’s taking a toll.”