Evan Gershkovich was on a reporting assignment in Yekaterinburg, some 1,400 km off Moscow, when Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) picked him up from a local bistro on March 29, 2023. The press accreditation by the Russian Foreign Ministry notwithstanding, the FSB slapped espionage charges against the 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter and detained him at the notorious Lefortovo prison, where political prisoners of the Soviet era were once held.
Mr. Gershkovich was handed out a 16-year sentence in July 2024, to be served at a penal colony. Much like the dawn that reveals itself after the darkest hour, the journalist’s prospects brightened as he, along with 15 others, was released by Russia on Thursday in exchange for eight prisoners sourced from five countries.
While Mr. Gershkovich’s 491 days spent behind bars in Russia are marred by monotony, for the nation outside his prison premises, it was a period marked by massive churning. Prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison; Vladimir Putin won an unprecedented fifth term as President; Russian forces began to make battlefield gains in Ukraine; and the administration clamped down on any form of dissent against the regime, and Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former Putin ally who led a rebellion against the Kremlin, was killed in a plane crash.
Some say the prisoner swap, perceived as a diplomatic triumph for the Biden administration ahead of the coming polls, also serves to legitimise Putin’s actions — of detaining foreigners and using them as diplomatic leverage. A WSJ report states that the seeds of the idea were originally sown by the U.S., whose forces in 2008 and 2010 arrested Russian nationals from Thailand and Liberia, to snuff out transnational threats after the September 11 attacks. Russia’s call for their release went unheeded during both Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s tenures.
Hostage diplomacy
With Joe Biden’s ascent to the office, the administration began to adopt a softer approach to ‘hostage diplomacy’. His government oversaw the swap of woman basketball player Brittney Griner, held in Russia on drug charges, for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. So did they release assets worth billions of dollars belonging to the sanctions-hit Iran in exchange for Americans. Venezuela, too, benefited from a similar deal, but not without stoking fears that it would incentivise hostage-taking by authoritarian leaders.
For Mr. Putin, Thursday’s arrangement was the fruition of his years-long effort to retrieve Vadim Krasikov, who was imprisoned in Germany after gunning down a Chechen rebel at a Berlin park in broad daylight in 2019. The U.S. saw it as an opportunity to bring back Paul Wheelan, a former Marine imprisoned in Russia since 2018 and for whose return clamour was growing at home.
Along with Mr. Wheelan and Mr. Gershkovich, those freed included Alsu Kurmasheva, the editor of Radio Free Europe, and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, convicted for criticising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Navalny’s name was also pushed by the West, especially Germany, where Krasikov was jailed. His death in February sparked fears that the plan to secure Mr. Gershkovich would come undone, but his mother Ella’s lobbying made sure that did not happen.
Mr. Gershkovich, the American-born son of Soviet-Jewish parents, worked as a cook before becoming a journalist. At the time of his arrest, Russian officials accused Mr. Gershkovich of collecting information about a defence contractor for the CIA, but, according to WSJ, he was working on a story on Russian tanks. His time in jail was spent in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a 9-foot X 12-foot cell.
Plight of prisoners
However, the bleakness of that setting had no bearing on the man who emerged on the tarmac of the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. After being greeted by President Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and his family, Mr. Gershkovich, in his first remarks, talked about his fellow detainees in prison.
“I spent a month in prison in Yekaterinburg, where everyone I sat with was a political prisoner. Nobody knows them publicly, they have various political beliefs. I would like to see if we could do something about them as well. I’d like to talk to people about that in the next weeks,” he said.
His resilience is best echoed through his message for the Russian President in his clemency letter. Mr. Gershkovich asked Mr. Putin if he would be willing to sit down for an interview after his release.
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