The future of 32-year-old American correspondent in Russia Evan Gershkovich began to be decided on Wednesday in a court in Yekaterinburg, the city that marks the separation of Russia between Europe and Asia. With his head shaved and his face visibly exhausted after a year and three months of pre-trial detention, the journalist from Russia, Evan Gershkovich, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The Wall Street Journal He has appeared in the first session of a trial in which he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison. The charges are based on the accusation that he allegedly spied on Russia when he was preparing a report for his newspaper about tank production in the country in the midst of the invasion of Ukraine. The White House, however, fears that the regime headed by Vladimir Putin is simply looking for a card with which to exchange its agents detained abroad.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist to be tried in Russia for espionage since the end of the Cold War. The trial takes place behind closed doors and the Russian Federal Security Service – the FSB, heir to the KGB – has charged him with this serious crime of espionage under article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. According to investigators, the journalist, arrested in March 2023, was collecting information for the US CIA about the country’s largest armored plant, the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhni Tagil, neighboring the city of Yekaterinburg.
Gershkovich has defended his innocence before the trial and assured that he was only going to publish an open journalistic text about Russian defense companies after contacting their managers and employees. In addition, the reporter was also preparing a report on the Wagner Group when he was arrested. At that time, the increase in Russian military production and the mercenary group’s offensive against Bakhmut made the front pages of newspapers around the world.
A “parody of justice”
The Wall Street JournalHe has accused Moscow of “piling Americans into prisons so they can negotiate with them later.” In its edition this Wednesday, the North American newspaper regretted that the closed-door trial offers Gershkovich “little or none of the legal guarantees that would be offered in the United States and Western countries.”
“The Russian legal proceedings are unfair to Evan and are a continuation of this travesty of justice that has already taken too long,” denounced the newspaper’s editor, Emma Tucker, in a letter to its readers. The editor of the North American newspaper expresses in that letter her fear that “this false accusation of espionage will inevitably lead to a false conviction for an innocent man.”
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Gershkovich made many friends during her time in Russia. “Seeing someone you care about with a shaved head in a glass cage is not something you can ever get used to,” the former correspondent for the newspaper laments. Political in Russia Eva Hartog. “And it’s even more infuriating because we know that Evan did nothing wrong, it’s his fault to be an American and do his job: journalism,” she adds.
The journalist denounces that “a 32-year-old man is a hostage to diplomacy.” “Evan is just a pawn of the Kremlin in its efforts to free its spies and criminals who have been imprisoned by Western governments,” says Hartog.
Washington has advised its citizens not to travel to Russia because they could become a target for the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in the interview he agreed to with the controversial American presenter Tucker Carlson in February that Moscow is open to negotiating the freedom of Gershkovich and other detained Americans in exchange for recovering his agent Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life imprisonment. in Germany for killing a Chechen dissident in Berlin in 2019.
“The special services are in contact with each other. They are talking and I think an agreement can be reached,” Putin declared during that conversation with Carlson.
In addition to Gershkovich, the Kremlin has more cards to pressure Washington. Among them, Russian-American reporter Alsou Kurmasheva, accused of failing to register as a foreign agent; ex-marine Paul Whelan, who is serving 16 years in prison for alleged espionage – an accusation that the US denies – and soldier Gordon Black, sentenced to three years and nine months in prison for allegedly threatening his ex-girlfriend and stealing 10,000 rubles from her – less than 100 euros—when he visited her this year in Vladivostok after meeting her in South Korea, where the soldier was deployed.
US President Joe Biden noted on the anniversary of Gershkovich’s arrest that Washington “works every day for his release.” “To Evan, to Paul Whelan, to all Americans taken hostage or wrongfully detained abroad: we are with you and we will never stop working to bring you home,” Biden promised.
In fact, his Administration set a precedent in 2022. That year he exchanged basketball player Brittney Griner, sentenced to nine years in prison for taking cartridges with less than half a gram of cannabis to Moscow, for the dangerous arms dealer Viktor Bout, known internationally as the Merchant of death.
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