Daily Times

Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter sentenced to 16 years in Russia on disputed espionage charges, was released Thursday in a major multinational prisoner swap after spending more than a year behind bars. Originally from Russia, the journalist returned in 2017 to the country of his parents, Soviet Jews who fled the USSR in the late 1970s, to report on anything from environmental disasters to the repression of the opposition during the Covid pandemic.

Evan Gershkovich, a US Wall Street Journal reporter who was serving a 16-year sentence in Russia for espionage, was among the 26 prisoners released Thursday in Ankara as part of one of the biggest multinational prisoner swaps since the Cold War, according to the Turkish presidency.

The 32-year-old son of Soviet emigres had reported from Russia for six years and carried on visiting the country even after dozens of other Western journalists left following Moscow’s 2022 Ukraine offensive.

Russia’s critics say his arrest for spying in March 2023 showed the Kremlin was prepared to go further than ever before in what President Vladimir Putin has called a “hybrid war” with the West.

Gershkovich, his employer and the White House rejected the spying allegations – the first levelled against a Western reporter in Russia since the Soviet era – and called the trial a “sham”. Before his trial started in June, he was held for 15 months in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison.

His case was heard by a closed military court in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, where he was arrested.

At the sentencing on July 20, after a trial with just three hearings, Gershkovich stood in a glass cage for defendants at the side of the court in dark trousers and a dark T-Shirt. He did not appear to react when the judge read the verdict and sentence.