US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has pressed his Russian counterpart for the immediate release of Jewish American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was detained last week on accusations of spying for the US.
President Joe Biden said, “Let him go” when asked about the case, while White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described the charges levelled against Gershkovich as “ridiculous”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov requested that the US “not politicise the arrest”, and not “make a fuss.”
Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Russia, was detained by Russian Federal Security Service agents while on a reporting assignment in the city of Yekaterinburg marking the first time Russia has brought a spy case against an overseas reporter since the Cold War.
In a statement, the FSB alleged that Gershkovich “acting on an assignment from the American side, was gathering information classified as a state secret about the activity of one of the enterprises of Russia’s military-industrial complex.”
The WSJ, his family, and the Biden administration all “vehemently deny” that Gershkovich was involved in espionage and have called for his immediate release.
Gershkovich, 31, is the son of Soviet-born Jewish exiles who settled in New Jersey. After hearing rumours that Soviet Jews were being deported to Siberia, his grandmother fled the Soviet Union with his mother, then 22, using Israeli documents.
His grandmother was a Ukrainian nurse and Holocaust survivor who, according to the WSJ, used “to weep when she talked about the survivors of extermination camps she treated at a Polish military hospital” towards the end of the Second World War.
His father, Mikhail, also left the Soviet Union as part of the same Jewish migration wave.
Before joining the WSJ in January 2022, a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Gershkovich worked in Russia for the English-language Moscow Times. It was during this time that he reportedly became “more interested in his Russian and Jewish roots”, according to his mother.
During this time his mother took him to visit one place that she had been afraid to visit as a teenager: a synagogue. Growing up, she “had been told that anybody entering it would be photographed and detained by the [KGB].
“That’s when Evan started to understand us better,” she said. Later, Gershkovich visited Moscow’s new Jewish Museum with his parents and elder sister, Dusya.
You may have seen a story this week about a Wall Street Journal reporter arrested in Russia on espionage charges.
— Andrew Allen (@AAllenSport) April 2, 2023
His name is Evan Gershkovich. He's 31. He grew up in New Jersey. He's a huge football fan.
And a massive Gooner.
(He's on the left wearing that terrible Puma kit) pic.twitter.com/FW8KLxUjI4
Gershkovich, who has reportedly not been granted access to the lawyer hired by the WSJ, is reportedly being held at the FSB’s Lefortovo prison and could face up to 20 years in prison.
Legal experts see little hope of him being released soon due to espionage trials in Russia being conducted in secret and almost always ending in a conviction.
The WSJ is one of a small handful of Western media outlets that continue to report from Moscow. Other western journalists still in Russia include the BBC's Jewish Russia editor Steve Rosenberg
But last week it withdrew its Moscow bureau chief and said Gershkovich’s jailing “challenges the bedrock notion that American reporters, authors, and researchers could work in Russia to learn about the vast and complicated country and its escalating conflict with the West. Nearly all Western journalists have pulled out of Russia, an exodus accelerated by Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest.”
In a tweet last July, Gershkovich wrote: “Reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”
