Russia says U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich to stand trial on espionage charges

Moscow — American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned for more than a year in Russia on espionage charges, will be tried in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal reporter’s indictment has been finalized and his case has been brought before the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city about 870 miles (1,370 kilometers) east of Moscow, according to the Russian Prosecutor General’s office.

Gershkovich is accused of “gathering secret information” for the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility in the Sverdlovsk region that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement, revealing for the first time the details of the charges against him.

Authorities have not provided any evidence to support the accusations. There was no information on when the trial would begin.

Gershkovich was detained during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and accused of spying for the United States. The reporter, his employer and the US government denied the allegations and Washington designated him as unjustly detained.

The Federal Security Service, or FSB, claimed at the time that he was acting on US orders to collect state secrets, but also provided no evidence.

President Vladimir 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 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 by the Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the US was “taking strong measures” to secure his release. He said such releases “are not decided by 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 faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

He 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.

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

Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, a notorious Tsarist-era prison used during Josef Stalin’s purges, when executions were carried out in its basement.

The Biden administration tried to negotiate his release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it would consider a prisoner exchange only after a verdict in his trial.

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.”

Since sending troops to Ukraine, Russian authorities have detained several U.S. and other Western citizens, apparently reinforcing this idea.