End a reporter’s year-long nightmare in Russia
Do not forget American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, on the anniversary of his detention in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. 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 Mr. Gershkovich, 32, on March 29, 2023, while he was reporting in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, 1,100 miles east of Moscow. 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 Mr. Gershkovich is being subjected. (He is still awaiting trial. A court this week extended his detention by three months.)
But this is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and thuggery reigns. Probably, Mr. Putin is holding Mr. Gershkovich as a chit to be traded for actual Russian spies or other criminals held in the West. Mr. 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.
On Jan. 27, the FSB arrested a 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 coworker as saying Khavana was collecting funds for humanitarian aid.
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 and his family claim are baseless. In a just and rational world, Mr. 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.