Gershkovich: One year as Putin’s hostage
It was “an anniversary that I hoped would never come,” said Linda Kinstler in Politico. One year ago, Russian security agents seized my friend Evan Gershkovich as he sat in a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, arresting The Wall Street Journal reporter “on baseless espionage charges.” A Moscow court last week extended his pretrial detention at the infamous Lefortovo prison for a fifth time, so his trial won’t start until June 30 at the earliest. The U.S. has proposed several prisoner swaps to bring Gershkovich home, but “each one has been rejected” by the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled that he’d be open to swapping the reporter for Vadim Krasikov—“one of his favorite hitmen,” serving life in Germany for the murder of a Chechen dissident—but no progress has been made. Gershkovich, 32, still sounds “upbeat and warm” in letters to family and friends, but any hope for a swift release “has now vanished.”
Putin has been methodically stocking his prisons with Americans, said Brian Michael Jenkins in The Hill. Businessman Paul Whelan was detained on bogus spying charges in 2018; Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested six months ago for failing to register as a foreign agent; ballerina Ksenia Khavana was seized in February for the high crime of donating $50 to a Ukrainian charity. Moscow accumulates these hostages as “a kind of bank account” that can be drawn on in negotiations with Washington. Locking up Western journalists also serves a useful domestic purpose for Putin, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. Throwing the likes of Gershkovich into “the darkness of Lefortovo” fires “a shot over the heads of any Russians” who might be tempted to speak to reporters about the president’s “mafia boss” rule.
American negotiators are hamstrung, said Aruna Viswanatha in The Wall Street Journal, because “the U.S. doesn’t have any Russians in its prison system” that the Kremlin wants back. But we’re not powerless, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. At minimum, the Biden administration should “be expelling Russian journalists” and prioritizing investigations of suspected Russian spies. To punish the Kremlin for its hostage taking, its murder of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and its invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. could also confiscate the millions of dollars in Russian reserve funds held in Western banks. It’s not clear if Putin would respond by freeing Gershkovich and other Americans. But “kick a bully in his midriff, and he may just loosen his clawlike grip.”