Evan Gershkovich Has Been In Prison In Russia For A Year
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Next week will mark one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by Russian authorities. He's been held for all that time in Moscow's Lefortova prison as Russian authorities extend his detention in one trial after another. When news broke of Evan's arrest, we aired a piece by OTM producer Molly Rosen about what the detention of a U.S. reporter means for journalism in Russia.

For the first months of the war, Valerie Hopkins, a New York Times correspondent who's usually based in Moscow, was in Ukraine. Then she went back to Moscow to cover the conflict from there. Evan became one of my closest friends when I went back after the war started in August last year. We got very close because it's a very difficult environment to work in and

At first, a lot of people were leaving. Then the censorship laws came out. Then they started charging people with the censorship laws. The Russian government passed several censorship laws in early March 2022. One against spreading so-called fake news and another against discrediting the Russian army. Those new laws made it really risky to be a journalist in Russia. And so most of the journalists left the country.

Evan and Valerie were a couple of the only American correspondents still working there. I talked a lot with Evan about what a privilege it was

And what a responsibility we both felt to be there at this time and do this work. And among the many things that are so heartbreaking about this is that Evan felt a real sense of journalistic mission of living through historic times. Being in Moscow, being in Russia does actually really feel every day like a time when you can see how society is changing, how a country is changing before your eyes.

And being able to chronicle it is really important. It was afternoon on Wednesday, March 29th, when Valerie noticed something might be wrong. We had actually a group chat with another American journalist where we basically talked almost every day. And I had sent him a message in the afternoon. And I remember going to bed on Wednesday and thinking, like, this is really weird. Why didn't he answer with something? He normally actually answers very fast.

Our security folks raised the alarm that they were unable to reach him. Gordon Fairclough is the Wall Street Journal's world coverage chief. He oversees all of the journal's foreign correspondents, including Eben. His phone stopped pinging and he missed one of his regularly scheduled call-ins. And so that...

then set off a scramble to try to find him. Evan has lived and worked in Russia as a journalist for almost six years. He joined The Wall Street Journal in January 2022, just about a month before Russia invaded Ukraine. One of the first stories he did after the war started was traveling to the border of Belarus and Ukraine, where he was the only Russian journalist, to my knowledge,

to witness the very large number of Russian casualties coming out from the offensive efforts around Kiev and saw caravans of ambulances and wounded Russian soldiers being loaded into trains to be shipped back to hospitals in Russia. Right, and that was a major story because Russia had been downplaying the casualties of its soldiers during the war, and Evan was the first American journalist, I think, to see on the ground proof of these casualties.

That's right. And those were in the very early days when we really weren't sure what was happening on the ground, you know, and it was one of the first significant indications that the Russians were having trouble. It wasn't until the day after Evan missed his regular check-in that the journal found out what had happened to him. We didn't manage to find him until the next morning when the FSB released a statement that he had been detained.

Russia's security agency says it has arrested a U.S. journalist working for the Wall Street Journal in Moscow on charges of espionage. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, accused him of, quote, acting on instructions from the American side to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes the state secret. He was charged and entered a plea of not guilty in a Moscow courtroom.

Nobody was allowed in that courtroom, no journalist, not even his own lawyer. Gershkovich is being detained at the notorious Lefortovo prison on the outskirts of Moscow. He is the first American reporter to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since 1986. He carries a sentence of 20 years in prison.

It's utter, it's utter rubbish. The Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, on CNN. Evan was doing what reporters do and what he did very well. He was out there gathering news, talking to people, reporting, providing an eyewitness account of what's going on inside Russia. Evan Gershkovich is a hostage.

Gulnoza Saeed is the Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. And Russia, the Russian government, is going to use him as a bargaining chip. There is plenty of precedent for what Evan and his editors at the journal are going through.

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian was taken hostage by Iran in 2014. Rezaian was released in a prisoner exchange in 2016. And a lot of media outlets have reported about potential prisoner exchange in Ivan Gershkovich's case.

And they've been throwing different names. Which also happened last year, when WNBA player Brittany Griner was tried on drug charges and sentenced to nine years in prison. She was then freed in exchange for Victor Boot, a Russian arms dealer being held by the U.S. But Saeed says that even when everything is going according to plan, that isn't a guarantee of immediate results.

Brittany Griner was held for 294 days, Jason Rezaian for 544. The case of Jason Rezaian just shows how important it is to keep the attention on the case because we as journalists know very well how news cycle works.

Meanwhile, the Russian public is being exposed to a very different media campaign. If you look at how Russian state media reported on Ivan Gershkovich's case, you would think that he was already a convicted spy, as if...

Ivan didn't have a right to presumption of innocence guaranteed by the Russian Constitution. State Duma member Andrey Asayev on one of Russian state TV's political talk shows said that journalism is an ideal cover for a spy. The legend of a journalist for a spy is absurd.

He says it was the West that started a half-cold, half-hot war against Russia, and that Evan Gershkovich is a captured spy of a state at war with Russia, caught on Russia's territory. He is undoubtedly a prisoner, and prisoners are sometimes subject to exchange.

So from all that, it is clear that the case is very political, especially because the immediate gain of the Russian authorities is to silence Ivan and his reporting. It's very unusual for nation states to detain foreign correspondents, even in countries with a bad record of violating press freedom.

According to CPJ's latest prison census, the vast majority of the 363 journalists imprisoned around the world were locked up by their own government. We are seeing this...

ramping up of repressions against journalists in Russia. Right now, we have, I believe there are 31 journalists persecuted for anti-war activities, anti-war stands. Dan Storiev is the managing editor of English language publications at OBD Info, a Russian human rights group. We kind of have this...

Repressive iceberg, as I like to put it, right, where at the bottom you have this long burning stamping out of journalism, of freedom of press, of civil society in Russia. You can be in prison up to 15 years for saying something that is not in according to Russian official position. Maria Kuznetsova is the spokesperson for OBD Info.

And we have a lot of public leaders and journalists who are accused on that and face such huge criminal charges because of just one thing they said. OVD Info has recorded around 200 criminal charges brought against people for violating the fake news laws and around 6,000 minor offenses brought against people for, quote, discrediting the Russian military.

And these have been brought against people for posting no to war or Ukrainian flag or even just a peace sign or a picture of a dove. We had cases when people were holding Leo Tolstoy book, War and Peace. And that book was considered as a discrediting Russian army. And the police wrote in the protocol that...

Leo Tolstoy did not support the Tsar regime and because this person was holding his book it means that he does not support the current regime in Russia. We had a guy who wrote special military operation but he just put quotation marks and the police wrote in the protocol that by putting quotation marks he was mocking the name and that means he was discrediting Russian army.

Maria Ponemarenko, a Russian journalist, was sentenced to six years in prison for posting that it was Russian planes that had bombed a theater full of children in Mariupol. Alexei Moskalyov, a single father, was arrested because his 13-year-old daughter drew an anti-war picture at school.

His daughter was put into an orphanage and then given to her estranged mother. We're seeing the Kremlin kind of reverting to the Soviet playbook. Dan Storiev. There is a Soviet saying that's kind of hard to translate, but it basically goes along the lines of, if you have a man, you will find an article to charge that man under. And so we're kind of coming back to that, where it doesn't really matter whether

what article are they going to prosecute you under? They're going to prosecute you anyway. And now with Evan, now this extends to the foreigners as well. It's now about two weeks since Evan was detained and...

I think every single day is probably incredibly psychologically and emotionally difficult. — Valerie Hopkins of The New York Times knew it was risky to be working as a journalist in Russia. But she told me that Evan's arrest partly came as such a shock because of the espionage charges. Foreign correspondents have to get their accreditation extended by the Russian government every three months. — If they really believed that Evan posed a risk, they could have chosen to not extend his accreditation.

which effectively would have anyways ended his ability to report from inside Russia.

But instead, they chose to do this escalation, which I think, you know, probably had the chilling effect that it intended. We withdrew our bureau chief. Evans boss, Gordon Fairclough. I'm not sure when I would consider it safe for us to have someone back on the ground in Russia. And that, of course, makes it harder for American audiences to know what's happening in Russia, right? Particularly at a time of, I think,

pretty significant diplomatic tension between Washington and Moscow. Having fewer avenues for mutual understanding is not a good thing.

The New York Times says that after it publicly moved most of its bureau out of the country last year, it's been sending journalists into Russia regularly to report stories. But it currently has no reporters based there. When I was asking myself about what price I was willing to pay to do journalism in Russia, in Russia of 2022, you know, I did sit and think a lot about whether or not it would be worth it if I wound up in jail.

Throwing journalists in jail is a hallmark of authoritarian countries, which the Soviet Union was and today's Russia has become. It's a history that Evan knows well. His parents emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union.

Both of us grew up as the children of immigrants. We bonded over being bilingual kids, loving Russian bands like Kinoa and also the Backstreet Boys. Like shortly before he was arrested, I remember we went and did karaoke, actually. You know, we sang Russian and American songs.

Kino, a band Evan loves, was this underground Soviet rock band. I keep thinking about a Kino song called April. The lyrics go, so much pain and scars, it's difficult to move. And April will die and be born once again.

I listened to this song a lot when I was in Russia on a journalism fellowship. When the war started, I was forced to leave the country. And in the chaos of that moment, I latched onto this song with its acknowledgement of pain and message of rebirth, like a kind of North Star. There's an email address that people can use to write Evan letters in prison. FreeGershkovich at gmail.com. I hope that if people do, this is the message he receives.

For On The Media, I'm Mollie Schwartz. OTN producer Mollie Rosen reported this piece a year ago. There aren't many updates in Evan's situation. He's still languishing in jail. But recently, in Russian President Vladimir Putin's interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin implied that he's interested in exchanging Gershkovich for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin currently being held in Germany.

U.S. State Department officials say that it made a new and significant proposal to Russia in December, which was rejected. Thanks for listening to our midweek podcast. Be sure to check out The Big Show on Fridays around dinnertime. I'm Michael Loewentjer.

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