As if there was any doubt that Evan Gershkovich would remain locked up for as long as the Kremlin pleased, a Russian court on Tuesday extended his pretrial detention by three months. Just in time for the anniversary of the 32-year-old American’s arrest on Good Friday, this seems like a particularly cynical move. Masked agents from the FSB secret service had the Moscow correspondent Wall Street Journal arrested on March 29, 2023 at a steak restaurant in Yekaterinburg.
Vladimir Putin himself recently revealed what a sticky net he had wrapped the American in. It is the same one in which Paul Whelan is floundering, an American businessman who has been in Russian custody since 2018. One strand reached as far as opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who died under Putin’s henchmen in mid-February.
Russia accuses Gershkovich of espionage, even though the Russian Foreign Ministry had accredited him as a journalist and he did his work in Yekaterinburg. Since then he has been held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison; his detention has already been extended five times and there is still no date for the start of the trial. UN experts recalled the anniversary, such lengthy pretrial detention raises “serious concerns about the presumption of innocence and the fairness of the legal process.” Gershkovich denies the allegations, and the State Department in Washington says he is being “unjustly detained” and is trying to secure his release.
With Gershkovich’s arrest, the dictator in the Kremlin achieved two goals at once. He used this to intimidate unpleasant media representatives; several correspondents have been denied visas since the attack on Ukraine. According to the latest survey by the “Committee to Protect Journalists”, 22 journalists are in Russian prisons; in addition to Gershkovich, there are numerous Russians, several Ukrainians and the Russian-American dual citizen Alsu Kurmasheva, to whom the USA has not yet granted the status of “wrongfully detained person”.
At the same time, Putin grabbed hostages from the Americans for cynical barter deals. He already had the American basketball player Brittney Griner imprisoned in 2022 in order to free Wiktor But, a gun dealer convicted in the USA. The Americans had hoped to free Paul Whelan in the swap. Putin let them run. Since then, US President Joe Biden has faced accusations that he valued the freedom of the lesbian African American Griner more highly than that of the former Marine Whelan, a white man. There are no longer any prisoners in the United States that the Kremlin has expressed interest in.
Recently, Putin raised hopes that he could enter into another exchange deal, only to brutally smother them again. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox commentator, he hinted at a possible “agreement” at the beginning of February: Germany should release the contract killer Vadim Krassikov, the “Tiergarten murderer” who shot the Georgian Zelimchan Changoshvili in Berlin.
Shortly after Putin’s tête-à-tête with Carlson, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US President Joe Biden talked in the Oval Office about how that Wall Street Journal reported. They decided to propose an exchange in which Russia would also release dissident Alexei Navalny. The Kremlin found out about it, and a week later Navalny was dead.
Evan Gershkovich keeps waiting. His parents, who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the USA, receive only scant news of their son. He is allowed out into the fresh air for an hour every day, he keeps himself fit, he talks to his cellmate, he meditates, he has Russian literature sent to him, and friends write him letters.
On the anniversary of the arrest, his colleagues read articles by Gershkovich for 24 hours, broadcast live on YouTube. Almar Latour, the head of the Dow Jones Group, to which the Wall Street Journal heard, read: “It’s hard to feel so helpless that you can’t do anything.” It was a quote from a woman who complained about the conditions under Putin. It could have come directly from Gershkovich’s cell in Lefortovo prison.