In Russia, international press credentials don’t keep journalists out of prison. But how to stop Vladimir Putin from using arrests to spur prisoner swaps?
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, left, stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Appeals Court of General Jurisdiction in Moscow, Russia, 23 April 2024. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Editor’s Note: 3 May marks World Press Freedom Day, first established by the United Nations in 1993 as a reminder to governments and citizens of the important work done by journalists around the world and the need to protect those journalists from harassment or harm.
To mark the day, News Decoder has published three stories. We started 1 May by republishing an article we first ran in May 2023 by Rafiullah Nikzad, about the mass exodus of journalists from Afghanistan and the aftermath of severe censorship for those who remain.
On 2 May 2024 we published a story by student author Joshua Glazer that examines the question of who is a journalist and therefore worthy of press protections.
Today, we publish an article by correspondent Helen Womack that looks at the continued imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia and Vladimir Putin’s use of arrest and imprisonment as a tool of power and oppression.
Another spring, and U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich languishes behind bars in a Russian prison instead of enjoying the freedom of the flowering world. Wrongly accused of spying, he appears to be being held hostage by the Putin regime to be used as a bargaining chip in a possible prisoner swap.
This may seem an extreme statement to make. Normal journalistic ethics would require News Decoder to balance Gershkovich’s defence with the official side of the story. But this is not a case where we can give equivalence to the truth and Russia’s narrative.
Gershkovich’s employers, the Wall Street Journal, have denied he was doing anything other than his job as a journalist. The U.S. government has said he is wrongly imprisoned.
“The accusations against Evan are categorically untrue,” said Lynne Tracy, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. “They are not a different interpretation of circumstances. They are fiction.”
The question is: why would Russia accuse a journalist from a reputable news organization of espionage?
The press as pawns on a diplomatic chessboard
Russian leader Vladimir Putin seemed to suggest a reason, in a 14 February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, a conservative talk show host in the United States, when he said that Evan might be “swappable.”
Asked whether Russia would be willing to release Gershkovich out of goodwill, Putin sighed deeply and said: “We have done so many gestures of goodwill out of decency that I think we have run out of them… However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that. Special services are in contact with one another. They are talking… I believe an agreement can be reached.”
Putin began his career in the Soviet-era security agency known as the KGB. He is known to love Cold War spy stories and no doubt remembers the Glienicke Bridge or “Bridge of Spies” between what was then East and West Germany, where real spies were swapped.
The first exchange took place in 1962, when Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, in jail in the United States, was swapped for Gary Powers, the pilot of a U.S. spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union.
But today’s swaps are not so equal. Western prisoners held in Russia can more accurately be called hostages.
“The Russian authorities are building up a bank of hostages, so they can play games with foreign partners,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security services specialist. “It is really dangerous for foreigners to come to Russia now. Not all are charged with spying; others are held on drugs charges.”
As publicity only raises the price of the hostage, some countries prefer to keep the cases private, Soldatov said, adding that the number of foreigners held ran “into the dozens.”
Swapping spies has a storied past.
Hostage-taking is nothing new. It has been practised since the Middle Ages and is a common tactic of terrorist groups. But we do not now expect states to do it.
Russia is not alone in turning to this cruelty. Iran held innocent BBC journalist Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in jail and later under house arrest for six years as part of a long-running financial dispute with Britain. She was released in 2022.
But Russia is holding more than 600 political prisoners, Ukrainian prisoners of war and foreigners detained on trumped up or minor charges.
In February 2022, U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia and charged with smuggling after customs officials found a small amount of medically-prescribed hash oil in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to what under Russian law was a minor offence and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In December the same year, she walked free after the United States swapped her for Viktor Bout, a notorious arms dealer jailed in America — hardly an equal exchange.
Hundreds of hostages linger in Russian prisons.
Paul Whelan, another American held in Russia, had been hoping to be included in the swap but was left stuck in jail, where he has been since 2020, when he was convicted of “spying” and sentenced to 16 years. Whelan, an ex-Marine, had gone to Moscow to attend a wedding, where compromising material was planted on him.
After Griner’s release, he spoke of his own disappointment and sense of betrayal by negotiators. “They’ve basically abandoned me here,” he said in an interview reported by The Guardian. “With each case, my case is going to the back of the line. They’ve kind of just left me in the dust.”
On the eve of his death in an Arctic prison camp in February, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was also being considered for a prisoner swap. Again, Putin himself confirmed this. The swap didn’t go ahead because Navalny died. “It happens. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s life,” Putin said.
Quite how Navalny died we may never know. Did the authorities change their plans and kill Navalny to take him out of the equation, as Russian opposition activists claim? Or did Navalny die from “natural causes,” weakened as he was by an earlier poisoning by the FSB — the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB —and hunger strikes in jail?
Among the “assets” Russia is believed to want back in any exchange is Vadim Krasikov, an assassin for the FSB in jail in Germany for having murdered a Georgian exile. Or, as Putin described the hit man in the Tucker Carlson interview, “a person who, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals… during events in the Caucasus.”
The way the prisoner swaps seem to work is that arrested victims must first go through the Russian courts, where acquittals are almost unheard of, and be sentenced. Negotiations for their release only open after they have had a taste of real time in a Russian labour camp.
This does not bode well for Gershkovich, who has been in pre-trial detention in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison since he was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg.
Gershkovich’s parents, Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich, Soviet Jews who emigrated to the United States, say their son is holding up well, spending his time reading. Fellow journalists are helping Evan Gershkovich keep his spirits up by writing to him via freegershkovich@gmail.com, which passes letters on to him in prison.
The FreeEvan campaign said it wasn’t easy for him to reply from Lefortovo but quoted Gershkovich as saying: “I am humbled and deeply touched by all the letters I have received. I’ve read each one carefully, with gratitude.”
Three questions to consider:
- What likens the current state of Russia to the Soviet Union under Stalin?
- What happens to a society when there are no journalists who can report on the government?
- How much freedom do you and your family have to express dissatisfaction with your government?
From column writing, British-born Helen Womack went on to write a book about her experiences in Russia: “The Ice Walk – Surviving the Soviet Break-Up and the New Russia”. From 1985 to 2015, Womack reported from Moscow for the Reuters international news agency as well as The Independent, The Times and the Fairfax newspapers of Australia. Now based in Budapest, she covers the European Union’s relatively new eastern members. Since the refugee crisis of 2015, she has written for the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, about how refugees are settling in Europe.
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