Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s trial in Russia on espionage charges to begin June 26

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russia spy trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will begin June 26 and will be held behind closed doors, said a statement from the court hearing the case on Monday.

Gershkovich, an American citizen, has been behind bars since his arrest in March 2023 and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

The trial will be held at the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, where he was arrested. Since then, Gershkovich has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.

The court said the trial will be closed to the public, as is customary in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering classified information” on CIA orders about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Attorney General’s office said last week in the first details of the charges against him.

The reporter, his employer and the US government denied the allegations and Washington designated him as unjustly detained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on US orders to collect state secrets, but provided no evidence to support the accusations.

“Evan did nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The accusations against him are false. And the Russian government knows they are false. He should be released immediately.”

The Biden administration tried to negotiate Gershkovich’s release, but the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner exchange only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned tank and railway car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a base of support for President Vladimir Putin.

The factory’s foreman, Igor Kholmanskikh, appeared on Putin’s annual call-in show in December 2011 and denounced the mass protests taking place in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability”, proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress agitation. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh as his envoy in the region.

Putin said he believed a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to exchanging him for a Russian citizen imprisoned in Germany. It was apparently Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 murder in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked by the Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the US was “taking strong measures” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that such disclosures “are not decided through mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

“And they should certainly be decided solely on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, alluding to a potential prisoner exchange.

Gershkovich was the first American journalist detained on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, despite the country enacting increasingly repressive laws on free speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for US-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with dual US and Russian citizenship, has been in prison since October, awaiting trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while gathering information about Russian military.

The son of Soviet émigrés who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work at The Moscow Times before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

US Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, called the accusations against him “fiction” and said Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

Separately, US soldier Gordon Black is on trial in Vladivostok on charges of robbery and threatening murder in a dispute with a Russian woman. Black, who was stationed in South Korea but visiting the Pacific coast city, on Monday told a court that he denied the allegation of threatening murder but “partially” admitted to the robbery, according to the news agency. state news RIA-Novosti.