The American journalist Evan Gershkovich will be tried in Russia accused of espionage, it was learned yesterday.
The Wall Street Journal journalist, held in a Moscow prison for more than a year, is accused of “gathering secret information” from a Russian tank factory for the CIA.
Gershkovich, 32, will stand trial in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, where he was detained.
His case was filed before the Sverdlovsky Regional Court, about 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow, according to Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office.
American journalist Evan Gershkovich, arrested on espionage charges, forms a heart with his hands inside a defendant’s cage.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, left, stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Court of Appeals of General Jurisdiction in Moscow.
Officials did not provide any evidence to support the allegations and there was no word on when the trial would begin.
The White House has tried to negotiate his release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a verdict in his trial.
Gershkovich was detained during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the United States.
The journalist, his employer and the United States government denied the accusations and Washington called him unjustly detained.
“Russia’s latest move toward a sham trial is, while expected, deeply disappointing and no less scandalous,” according to a statement from Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Journal, and Emma Tucker, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.
They added that the charges against Gershkovich were “false and unfounded.”
“The Russian regime’s smear against Evan is disgusting, repugnant and based on calculated and transparent lies. Journalism is not a crime. “Evan’s case is an attack on press freedom,” the statement said.
“We had hoped to avoid this moment and now hope that the United States government will redouble its efforts to free Evan.”
Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned tank and rail car factory in Nizhny Tagil, about 60 miles north of Yekaterinburg, became known as a support base for President Vladimir Putin.
Evan Gershkovich, arrested last March in Russia for ‘espionage’, will be tried in a court in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals
The journalist, his employer and the United States government denied the accusations and Washington designated him as unjustly detained.
The plant foreman appeared on Putin’s annual phone show in December 2011 and denounced the mass protests that took place in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability.”
A week later, Putin appointed the plant foreman as his envoy to the region.
Putin has said he believed a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting that he would be willing to trade him for a Russian citizen imprisoned in Germany, who appeared to be Vadim Krasikov.
He was serving a life sentence for the 2019 murder in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.
Asked last week about Gershkovich, Putin said the United States is “taking strong measures” to secure his release.
He told international news agencies in St. Petersburg that such publications were done using a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”
Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
He was the first American journalist to be detained on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War.
Gershkovich, the son of Soviet emigrants who settled in New Jersey, was fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times before joining the Journal in 2022.
Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a famous Tsarist-era prison used during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship.
US ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction”.