Remember captives locked up in Russia
Do not forget American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, as the anniversary of his detention in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison approaches. He is innocent of the charges of espionage leveled against him. His incarceration is both an affront to press freedom and a flagrant case of hostage-taking. He has our unwavering support.
Officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, arrested Gershkovich, 32, on March 29, 2023, while he was reporting in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, 1,100 miles east of Moscow. Gershkovich was born in New Jersey, the son of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the 1970s from the Soviet Union. He had been in Moscow for six years before his arrest, reporting for Agence France-Presse and the Moscow Times before joining the Wall Street Journal. Unlike many of his colleagues from Western media, he chose to remain in the country after the invasion of Ukraine began. Far from committing espionage, he had followed Russia’s rules for international journalists and was carrying accreditation from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, official permission for reporting in Russia.
Not even during the Cold War, when the Soviet police state routinely harassed and sometimes expelled Western correspondents, did any U.S. reporter receive the kind of long-term detention to which Gershkovich is being subjected. (He is still awaiting trial.) The closest parallel is the case of U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff, whom Soviet authorities detained in 1986, also on phony charges of espionage. The regime kept him for just 13 days in Lefortovo, followed by 17 days of house arrest in the U.S. Embassy, before letting him return to the United States in exchange for a Soviet official arrested in the United States.
But this is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and thuggery reigns. Probably, Putin is holding Gershkovich as a chit to be traded for actual Russian spies or other criminals held in the West. Putin used similar tactics in the case of U.S. women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, arrested at a Moscow airport on dubious drug charges in February 2022 and released in a trade that December for Viktor Bout, a Russian convicted in the United States of arms trafficking and other crimes. The next such offender Moscow hopes to deal for could be Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin convicted in Germany in December 2021 of the brazen daylight murder of a Chechen dissident in a central Berlin park.
As though one journalist behind bars were not enough, Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was arrested on Oct. 19. A dual U.S.-Russian citizen, she has been held on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent. She had traveled to Russia in May to visit her ailing mother. Her lawyers say Kurmasheva is also being investigated on charges of discrediting the Russian military stemming from a book of antiwar stories she edited, but those charges have not been presented in court.
On Jan. 27, the FSB arrested another dual U.S.-Russian citizen, Ksenia Khavana, 33, of Los Angeles, on charges of treason. The accusations appear preposterous. Purportedly, she was raising money for Ukraine’s military. The Associated Press quoted a co-worker as saying Khavana was collecting funds for humanitarian aid and had donated to Razom for Ukraine, a U.S.-based nonprofit that says it provides medical kits and disaster relief to those affected by Russia’s invasion. Like that of Gershkovich, her arrest took place in Yekaterinburg, where she was visiting family. Not to be overlooked is Paul Whelan, the ex-Marine arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020 on espionage charges that he claims are baseless.
In a just and rational world, Putin would unconditionally free these people. In this misbegotten moment, though, it falls to the Biden administration to explore every possible option to secure their releases, including negotiations with Moscow, to make sure this bitter anniversary never comes around again. Meanwhile, the cruelty Putin is inflicting upon these Americans, and their families, cannot be overstated.