Family awaits jailed US reporter’s return
Nearly a year since US journalist Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on espionage charges, his parents are counting on a “very personal” promise from President Joe Biden to bring him home.
The US government has declared that Gershkovich, who categorically denies the spying accusations, is wrongfully detained, and negotiations are underway to swap him in a prisoner exchange.
“He made a very personal, very strong commitment to do whatever it takes to bring Evan home and that has been tremendous for us.”
Evan’s father Mikhail Gershkovich told AFP in an interview this week, describing meeting Biden last April.
Efforts to free Gershkovich, 32, who was detained in March 2023 while on a reporting trip in the Urals, have been further complicated since the death in prison earlier this month of Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who, his team says, was also part of a prisoner exchange plan under discussion.
President Vladimir Putin has indicated that he could be ready to swap Gershkovich for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian national serving life in prison in Germany for the murder of a separatist commander in a Berlin park in 2019, BUT 7ESTERN OFkCIALS WOULD NOT divulge any details of the talks.
Meanwhile, Evan’s parents, Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, spend their days trying to maintain hope through anguish and pain.
“We have no other choice. We need to be strong, strong for Evan,” his mother Ella Milman told AFP.
Ella and Mikhail, now in their 60s, raised Evan and his older sister Danielle, 34, speaking Russian at home, eating Russian food, watching Soviet cartoons and knowing not to whistle inside the house because that brings bad luck.
“We were navigating between
two worlds,” Danielle said in her apartment in Philadelphia. “It’s that feeling when you go to school, and you’re in America, and you come home and it’s somewhere else.”
Yearning to understand the birthplace of his parents, Evan moved to Russia in 2017 to work for the English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times. His mother was excited for him, but his father had his doubts, seeing how freedoms were shrinking under Putin.
)N 2USSIA %VAN lOURISHED AS A reporter, covering politics, but also seeking out less obvious stories,
such as efforts to preserve a disappearing indigenous language in a 2USSIAN PROVINCE OR DYING kSH IN a Siberian river.
After a stint at AFP in Moscow, Evan was hired by the Wall Street Journal.
In September 2018, Ella and Danielle visited Evan in Moscow. The city had just hosted the 2018 World Cup and Evan was eager to show them the dynamic, modern capital with a rich social and cultural scene.
At Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, the reporter shares a small cell with another inmate. He gets an hourlong walk in a small prison yard EVERY DAY TRIES TO STAY kT THROUGH
exercise and relies on fruit and vegetables sent by friends to supplement the meager prison diet.
In May, Evan’s parents traveled to Moscow and were able to talk to him BRIElY IN PRISON AND THEN IN COURT
The joy that Ella felt was quickly overshadowed by the pain of having to leave him there. “When I saw him being led out in those handcuffs — hard to take,” Ella said.
Last week, a Moscow court again extended Evan’s arrest pending trial, as he looked out wearily from a glass defendant’s cage. Painful as they are, these court proceedings at least provide his family a chance to lay eyes on him.