WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich fell in love with Russia — its language, the people he chatted with for hours, the punk bands he hung out with at Moscow dive bars. Now, espionage charges leave him facing a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years.
The cellphone was no longer pinging. The last time Wall Street Journal staff heard from Evan Gershkovich was last Wednesday, just before 4 p.m., when he had arrived at a steakhouse in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. It was the Russia correspondent’s second trip to the Ural mountains in a month.“Thanks brotha,” replied Gershkovich: “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
His employer, colleagues and the Biden administration all deny Russia’s claim that he was spying on behalf of the U.S., and have called for his immediate release. Diplomats and legal experts see little hope Gershkovich, a reporter accredited by the Russian foreign ministry, will immediately be freed, given that espionage trials in Russia are conducted in secret and almost always end in a conviction.
The U.S. in December released convicted Russian arms-trafficker Viktor Bout in an exchange for U.S. women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, whom Russian authorities had detained in the days before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Griner had been sentenced to nine years in a penal colony after being found carrying hashish oil in her luggage. She was later convicted of drug smuggling and possession.
Gershkovich, who hasn’t been granted access to the lawyer hired by the Journal, is being held at the FSB’s Lefortovo prison, where Russia holds most suspects in espionage cases. Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine jailed in 2020 and serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian prison colony on similar charges, was also initially held there.
Gershkovich’s father, Mikhail, also left the Soviet Union as part of the same Jewish migration wave. The two met in Detroit then moved to New Jersey where Evan and his elder sister, Dusya, grew up. Ella Gershkovich said this period made her son more interested in his Russian and Jewish roots. One day, decades after the fall of Communism, she took him to a building that she had been afraid to visit as a teenager: a synagogue. She had been told that anybody entering it would be photographed and detained by the secret service.
Dressed in baggy faded jeans, Gershkovich would meet friends and colleagues at Veladora, a downtown Mexican restaurant, and also at a nearby kitsch cafe known to serve the best cheesecake in the city, which by now had become his second home.
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