OPINION:
Last week, Russia’s Federal Security Service arrested Evan Gershkovich, Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, on trumped-up charges of espionage, a clear act of hostage-taking that his editor, Emma Tucker, called a “total outrage,” and which 200 Russian journalists have condemned in an open letter.
Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest marks Vladimir Putin’s first arrest of an American journalist, and one who worked for one of the world’s most widely recognized news organizations, signifying an inflection point of Moscow’s apparent intent to declare war on all journalists.
The son of parents who fled Soviet Russia in 1979 amid rumors that Jews were about to be exiled to Siberia, Evan was born in New Jersey in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. Knowing his family history, he developed a fascination with his ancestral homeland and studied Russian culture, history and language.
At 18, the Princeton native graduated as a top student from high school, and soon attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he wrote for its newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, the nation’s oldest continuous college weekly. He also connected with his classmates and local residents by working as a DJ at WBOR radio.
After working as a cook to pay off his school loans, Mr. Gershkovich took a job as an assistant at The New York Times. In 2016, he moved to Russia to work for The Moscow Times, and after about three years, he took a position with the Agence Presse-France. There, he won journalism awards for his coverage of the environmental impact on salmon populations and the preservation of minority languages in Russia.
“He fell in love with Russia — its language, the people he chatted with for hours in regional capitals, the punk bands he hung out with at Moscow dive bars,” says a March 31 Journal piece, which also revealed that the 31-year old reporter slept in a Siberian forest amid fires and sat with Russian freshman medical students in COVID-19 wards while they treated “a flood of patients.”
In January 2022, Mr. Gershkovich got the break of a lifetime to cover the country he loved in the Moscow bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He traveled to the Belarus-Ukraine border the following month, and was the only U.S. journalist to witness the first wounded Russian forces being sent home after Moscow invaded Ukraine. For the next year, he reported on the Russian civilians who mourned Ukrainian losses, Moscow’s military tactics, the Russian shelling of Ukrainian civilians, and the political maneuvers of Vladimir Putin. His last story, published March 28, covered how Russia’s invasion negatively affected its economy.
The next day, Mr. Gershkovich was detained by the FSB in Yekaterinburg, a small city in western Siberia, several hundred miles from Moscow, where, according to Reporters Without Borders, he was researching the Russian mercenary Wagner Group. His editors last heard from him after he entered a steakhouse. His cellphone went dark two hours later, leaving the Journal’s lawyers unable to reach him.
Since then, Mr. Gershkovich has been jailed in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, where he will languish until a May 29 hearing. In the 1930s, the prison was used by Stalin’s Soviet NKVD Secret Police to conduct mass executions and interrogational torture. The prison has strict conditions and allows visits only from lawyers. All letters to inmates are reviewed by prison officials.
The Kremlin has said Mr. Gershkovich’s trip to Yekaterinburg had “nothing to do with journalism,” insisting that the reporter was “trying to obtain secret information” related to “the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
Despite the Kremlin’s depiction of Yekaterinburg as an obscure military-industrial oblast, is a significantly sized city that hosted four games during the 2018 FIFA World Cup and was a planned host city for the 2023 World University Games. It was also Mr. Gershkovich’s second trip to the Ural Mountains in a month.
None of this should be surprising, however. In a telephone interview with The Washington Times, David Satter, a former Moscow Financial Times correspondent and author who was expelled by Russian authorities in 2013 said Russia’s espionage statute was designed to interchangeably define journalistic investigations as espionage.
“Russia’s espionage statute is so broad it can be applied arbitrarily,” he said. “They can classify the simple collection of normal journalistic information as espionage. It’s completely up to them. The statute doesn’t provide any barrier for the government.”
According to Tatyana Stanovaya, an expert on Moscow’s political tactics, the Kremlin’s definition of “collecting information” could simply mean interviewing experts, while the accusation of “acting on U.S. instructions” could include a U.S. journalist taking assignments from editors.
Since Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest, the Journal has ordered its Moscow bureau chief to leave Russia, evidencing an apparent chilling effect. The Journal’s decision comes a year after The New York Times pulled its own reporters in the wake of legislation enacted to punish journalists for up to 15 years if they report “false information” about the Ukraine invasion.
While Moscow’s draconian censorship laws have resulted in charges against thousands of Russians, Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest marks the first time the Kremlin has detained an American journalist since 1986, when U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was taken into custody by the KGB — three days after the FBI arrested a Soviet physicist as part of a sting operation for espionage. He was later traded back to the U.S. as part of a prisoner exchange.
Our role as journalists is to report the truth as a means of ensuring justice. Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest should herald a call for every journalist who cares enough to preserve the integrity and independence of the Fourth Estate. He answered that call with selfless bravery by remaining in Russia after it invaded Ukraine to tell the world the truth.
While this is not an editorial, I feel confident in saying my colleagues at The Washington Times stand in solidarity with our fellow journalists at The Wall Street Journal. An act to censor any journalist with malicious prosecution is an act to censor us all. Now is the time to stand together and report on Evan Gershkovich’s case with vigilance until he is free.
A campaign to free Evan Gershkovich has been organized at https://www.freegershkovich.com.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and investigative journalist who has reported on Russian affairs. He currently serves on The Washington Times’ editorial board and can be reached at jshapiro@washingtontimes.com.
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