The Daily - The American Journalist on Trial in Russia

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist for The Wall Street Journal, was detained in Russia more than a year ago. He has been locked up in a high-security prison and accused of spying for the U.S. government.His trial, held in secret, is now underway.Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses the complicated geopolitics behind Mr. Gershkovich’s detention and the efforts to get him home.Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Russia opened its secret trial of Mr. Gershkovich, who is accused of espionage.A United Nations panel said he was being punished for his reporting on the war in Ukraine.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benholt. This is The Daily. Now to a big setback for Evan Gershkovich. The Wall Street Journal reporter held in Russia on espionage charges for more than a year. American journalist Evan Gershkovich was detained in Russia more than a year ago. The reporter for The Wall Street Journal is accused of spying for the U.S. and could face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. Gershkovich has been locked up in a high-security prison accused of spying for the U.S. government.

The Russian authorities did not even provide any evidence of a crime. In fact, they have provided no real justification for holding him. His trial, held in secret, is now underway. Today, my colleague Anton Troianovsky on the complicated geopolitics behind Gershkovich's detention and the efforts to get him home. It's Wednesday, July 3rd. Anton, Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, is now on trial in a Russian court defending himself against allegations of being a spy for the CIA.

If convicted, Evan is looking at up to 20 years in prison. You know Evan well. Tell us a little bit about him. So Evan is a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal writing about Russia. He's 32 years old. He grew up in New Jersey. And in addition to having this journalistic curiosity about the world, had this really personal interest in Russia that came in part clearly from his upbringing. Evan's parents are Soviet Jewish emigres to the U.S. They fled the Soviet Union in 1979 and raised Evan in a Russian-speaking household, showing him Soviet-era cartoons, you know, having the kind of food at the table you would have in

the Soviet Union. And through his early adult life, he wanted to be a journalist and a foreign correspondent specifically. He was also actually an assistant in the newsroom of the New York Times. And then he took a risk. He quit that job and moved to Moscow, where he started out in this very entry-level role as a reporter for the Moscow Times. So he was a correspondent in Moscow, just like you, which presumably is where you guys met. Yeah, exactly. We met actually at a Starbucks in very early 2018 when I had just started my stint in Moscow as a Washington Post bureau chief. And I was hiring a correspondent. He applied.

And at that time, he was just starting out, so he didn't get that job. But when I met him, I saw this experience that we had in common of having been raised in a Soviet immigrant household and a Russian-speaking household in the United States. So I really watched him rise as a journalist in the ensuing years, and he also became a friend. Having been a foreign correspondent myself, when you're posted to another country, you really kind of bond with the other foreign correspondents, right? And I imagine that this is possibly even more so the case in a place like Russia, which has grown increasingly hostile to its journalists. Yeah, you do, you do. And certainly in these last years before the invasion of Ukraine, as things got more and more hostile in Putin's relationship with the West, as we had, obviously, the COVID pandemic, which made it really hard to travel. Yeah, that was a time when the relatively few foreign correspondents in Moscow bonded. And in your work out there, did it ever feel risky? I wonder if there was ever a concern that Avin or any of you other foreign correspondents on the ground had about maybe facing arrest or getting into trouble with the authorities.

Was he worried about that? So it was a hostile environment in terms of the rhetoric that the West was basically determined to destroy Russia. There was a lot of talk about the media war, as Putin called it, that journalists were seen to be a part of. But at the same time, you know, Western journalists were able to operate in Russia pretty freely. You received journalist visas, you received an official accreditation from the Russian foreign ministry. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, it suddenly seemed that all bets were off.

One of the things that happened was just after the invasion, Putin signed a law punishing so-called fake news about the war with as much as 15 years in prison. And I remember, didn't they even like outlaw the word war at the time? Yes, exactly. One of the things was, of course, the Kremlin was calling it a special military operation, not a war. And it seemed like even that could be grounds for prosecution. a war. And it seemed like even that could be grounds for prosecution. So in those first weeks of the war, a lot of journalists, both Russian and foreign correspondents left. So did we at the New York Times. We also temporarily pulled our journalism staff from the country. But then in the ensuing months, it started looking like this law was only going to be used against Russian journalists or people publishing in Russia, not foreign correspondents. And so reporters increasingly started going back.

We did, our colleague Valerie Hopkins, a frequent guest on this show, started reporting from Russia again. So did Evan. And so for about a year there, it looked like it was still possible to do reporting safely inside the country. And then came March 29th, 2023. That was the day that Evan disappeared. He was on a reporting trip to the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountain region. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting on this, the last his colleagues heard from him was when he was headed into a meeting at a steakhouse in that city.

And the next day, March 30th, I remember having breakfast, listening to this YouTube morning show done by Russian journalists that I often listen to. And they said, we have some breaking news coming in. Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist, has gone missing. And this was just that horrifying jolt of like, is this the moment that something really

awful happens to an American journalist working in Russia? And then within a few hours, it became clear that this really was that awful moment, and that Evan's arrest was not some kind of

misunderstanding, but that it had been very much approved and probably ordered by the Kremlin. So Evan's arrest came directly from the Kremlin. How do we know that? Well, a couple hours after those initial reports of Evan's disappearance, the FSB, Russia's domestic security service, the successor agency to the KGB, put out a statement saying, Evan Gershkovich, Wall Street Journal reporter, has been detained

on suspicion of espionage, on suspicion of collecting information on behalf of the United States about the military-industrial complex of Russia. And just after that, in his regular call with reporters, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, said Evan had been caught, quote, red-handed. The Kremlin usually publicly takes an arm's-length approach to various arrests, even when they pretty clearly have some kind of political motivation. But in this case, to have Putin's spokesman saying publicly immediately, pretty much after the arrest, that was just as clear a signal as could be that this was not any kind of misunderstanding. And I mean, I think we should just say here to be totally clear that there's been absolutely no evidence made public.

He, the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. government have all vigorously denied that he was doing anything other than journalism. This was a move that was approved by Putin. And why would Putin do that? Approve the arrest of a journalist, an American journalist himself? What message was he hoping to send here? I mean, I see three main factors at play here. The first is just the context of his big conflict with the West, with the United States, which Putin sees as existential for Russia.

And in that conflict, it seems like Putin feels he has to constantly show the West that he's ready to escalate, that he's ready to break taboos, do the unexpected, inflict pain on the West. And so here, arresting an American journalist is very much a way that Putin has found to create new problems for the Biden administration. The second reason is cracking down on journalism, scaring journalists, something that Putin has been very proficient at for more than 20 years. For most of that time, he was mainly focusing on cracking down on Russian journalists. And now what we're seeing with Evan's arrest is that Putin is making clear that being a foreign correspondent in Russia is a dangerous business. And then third, and I think most

immediately and kind of most relevant for what's happening now is he's taken Evan as a bargaining chip. It's something that we've seen before. Think of Brittany Griner, the basketball star who was arrested in Moscow in 2022. And the Kremlin eventually negotiated her release in exchange for the U.S. releasing Victor Boot, a convicted arms trafficker. Okay, so for all these reasons, they arrest Evan. And what happens to him at this point? He gets flown to Moscow and put in the Lefortovo prison in the Russian capital. It's a prison that Evan knew very well as a journalist.

Lots of high-profile people end up there, as they had since Soviet times. And so that's where Evan spent the next 15 months. So what does that look like? What is life like for Evan inside this prison? So what's special and awful about this prison is the incredible isolation that inmates face. They're typically held in these small cells, roughly 9 by 12 feet. They typically spend 23 hours a day in these cells with the light on. The isolation is so extreme that when you get taken through the prison corridor to your interrogation, the wardens make these clicking sounds as they're leading an inmate to make sure that other wardens know that someone is coming and to avoid even the possibility of two inmates running into each other in the hallway.

So Evan is almost completely isolated in there. Does he have any contact with the outside world? So he's not allowed visits from friends or family. The one saving grace, if I can put it that way, here has been that he is able to exchange letters with the outside world. The letters have to be in Russian. They have to go through the prison censorship system. But his friends did set up a way for people to write him letters by just sending letters to an email address. Those letters get translated into Russian, printed out and sent to Evan in prison,

and he's able to respond longhand. Have you been corresponding with him? I have. Yeah. You know, it's been a just crazy experience because, again, Evan had covered Russian journalists who were arrested and Russian political prisoners held in jail, as had I, right? And we had both written about and interviewed people who were corresponding with journalists or political prisoners in Russian jail. And so it was just such a mind-bendingly awful experience to suddenly have your own friend end up in that situation. So yes, I have been corresponding with him. It's been just incredibly powerful and inspiring to see how Evan's character has stayed strong, and maybe most importantly, how he has retained his wacky sense of humor. So he's still keeping

his spirits up. And I know that that means he also wants all of us to keep up our morale. It sounds like from your descriptions that he's not lost hope. And yet I'm sure as a seasoned foreign correspondent in Russia, he knows that his trial is not a real trial. He must be aware of the odds. Yes, he knows that very well, that even though we see the trappings of an independent judiciary, the Russian judiciary is nothing of the kind. And there is no such thing as due process in Russia as we know it here in the U.S. More than 99% of Russian criminal cases end in conviction. Wow. So his conviction, now that his trial has started,

is a foregone conclusion. And really, at this point, the main hope that he has of getting out and returning home is completely outside his control, completely outside the Russian judicial system, and actually goes all the way to international geopolitics. We'll be right back. So, Anton, you've said that Evans' conviction is really a foregone conclusion, which means he could be sentenced to decades in prison in Russia.

Is there any hope at all of getting him out of Russia? So, it's still an open question. He faces 20 years in prison. And it does look like the most realistic way for him to get out before then is some kind of prisoner swap between Putin and the United States. So the idea is that the U.S. gives Putin some kind of high-profile Russian operative or someone considered kind of a loyal servant by Putin, and he sends Evan back in return. That's right.

And that's obviously something we've seen several times already with other Americans taking prisoner in Russia in the last few years. Putin has made it clear that he's interested in a prisoner swap. My colleague, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, Evan Gershkovich, has been held in Lefortovo prison without a trial for 37 weeks. In fact, our colleague Valerie asked Putin about Evan

in his annual press conference last December. What will it take to bring them home? We don't want to refuse to return them. We don't refuse. We want to make a deal. And Putin responded, we want to make a deal, but it should be mutually acceptable to both sides, basically making it clear he sees Evan as an asset to bargain away. But the problem is that though Putin wants to make some kind of deal, it's not clear who, if anyone, the U.S. has in terms of a Russian convicted of a crime that Putin would want. Right. You had a guy and you mentioned he was traded for Brittany Greiner. And now you have no one left that Putin is interested in. Not that we know of. But in February, it became clear that Putin sees something more elaborate,

more complicated as a potential prisoner swap that would involve Evan. Tucker Carlson came to Moscow in February to interview Putin and asked about Evan. And Putin said he was interested in a Russian prisoner named Vadim Krasikov, who was in prison in Germany, having been convicted of a political assassination in Berlin in 2019. assassination in Berlin in 2019. I totally remember that case. Actually, I was based in Berlin at the time and wrote about it. This guy is basically a Russian assassin, right? And he was caught, if I remember correctly, after this incredibly brazen murder where he shot someone in broad daylight right in the center of Berlin. Exactly. He shot a former Chechen separatist fighter in the Tiergarten Park in Berlin's Central Park in 2019. It was a really shocking case of a Russian political assassination in a European capital. And it's become clear that this is the guy Putin wants for Evan. And I guess the key thing is that this guy has stayed

completely silent. He hasn't told the German authorities anything. And Putin wants to reward that kind of loyalty. Yeah, exactly. That is really Putin's MO. He values loyalty above all else. And doing a trade that releases a Russian assassin who committed this political murder in the heart of Europe, that would be sending an extremely strong message on behalf of Putin. But this is a German prisoner, not an American prisoner. So what makes Putin think that Germany will oblige, that the U.S. can actually offer this guy up for a trade? Well, Putin's worldview is that the U.S. is in charge. He often refers to Western European countries as vassals

or satellites of Washington. So he thinks he can negotiate a deal with the Biden administration to orchestrate some kind of release here. And is he right? What are the chances of this actually happening? Well, it's complicated. As you know, the Germans historically don't like to do this. They don't have a track record of doing prisoner exchanges, even to free their own citizens who have been detained abroad because of the concern that doing so could encourage further hostage taking. Right. It kind of sets a precedent in a way. Yes.

So where are these current negotiations concerning Evan at? Do we know anything? So obviously they're happening very much behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal has reported that when Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, visited President Biden at the White House early this year, that this came up, that at the time he and Biden discussed a potential deal that would involve freeing Vadim Krasikov, the assassin, in exchange for releasing Evan, for releasing Paul Whelan, another American who's held in Russia right now, and potentially for Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident. But then Navalny died.

That's right. He died on February 16th, just a week after that Oval Office meeting between Biden and Schultz. We still don't know the circumstances of that death. But ever since, American and Russian officials have continued to say that negotiations are ongoing. In fact, it does appear from the reporting out there about this that Germany is open to helping the U.S. here. But it would be politically difficult in Germany to release an assassin. And it would have been perhaps easier to do that if Navalny had been involved. We know very little about what a potential trade now would look like.

So tell us about this trial that has just started. It's clear that this is a sham trial. There's been no evidence presented. But what do you expect that to look like? There's been no evidence presented. But what do you expect that to look like? where basically the Russian government is trying to kind of give this veneer of legality to the repressions it carries out. In this case, the trial is actually going to be a secret trial closed to the public. And that is in the court's telling because there are state secrets involved here. courts telling because there are state secrets involved here. And that is, in fact, how espionage trials or treason trials are typically carried out. Again, we can fully expect a conviction. In fact, the judge in this case told local media a few years ago that he had only had three or four acquittals in more than 20 years of service. Oh, great. What a thing to boast about. Exactly. So that gives you a sense of the attitude going in here. The trial could take months. The

first hearing was last week, June 26th. The next one has been scheduled for August. And this is all taking place in a courthouse in Yekaterinburg, where Evan was arrested. So he's now been moved from that prison where he spent about the first 15 months of his arrest in Moscow. But again, the main, most important thing is going to be the negotiations taking place behind the scenes. And I think you can very much expect that if there were to be some kind of agreement, that if there were to be some kind of agreement, that a trial could be sped up because the Russians have also said that they only will do trades when the person is convicted in Russia. So, Anton, why even bother with this trial that is so clearly a sham? I mean, they've presented no evidence. And Putin himself is going out publicly saying

that Evan is pretty much a bargaining chip for him to get a Russian prisoner, a hitman, out of jail. Why bother with this trial at all? You got to remember that Putin is always playing to multiple audiences. And here, one of the main audiences is domestic. This trial is being covered in the Russian media, on Russian TV. And it's very important for Putin to continue sending the message to Russians inside the country that there are American spies. You can't trust the West. Journalists can't be trusted. That's the kind of message around this trial that the Russian public is seeing on TV. So, you know, they're seeing what is described to them as a judicial system at work.

Of course, I'm sort of aware, Anton, as we're coming to the end of this conversation, that the backdrop to this trial is the war in Ukraine, right? And it sort of strikes me that that war is, you know, in the third year and Ukraine is struggling and Putin can look quite triumphant at times. People are sort of asking the question of whether he's winning. And I look at this negotiation here and I'm thinking the stakes for Putin are actually pretty low, right? What does he have to lose in the end? So are we dealing in a way, we the West, are we dealing with a kind of triumphant Kremlin?

Well, I think that Putin in many ways sees that he's engaged in this conflict with a weak hand. engaged in this conflict with a weak hand. He's got a small economy, relatively speaking, a conventional military that struggles on the battlefield. So even though Putin has managed to take some momentum in Ukraine and does see Ukraine as part of that bigger fight he's waging against the West, he's still overall struggling to get his way. And so that's where the negotiations around Evan's freedom come in. Evan has become in this incredibly devastating way a pawn in this geopolitical conflict. And Putin is doing this more and more also. There have been other foreigners arrested in Russia just in recent months. And last year, there was also another American journalist, Alsu Kurmashiva of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, arrested, and she

remains behind bars. So Putin is actually continuing to broaden out this conflict that, you know, we might think of just as the war in Ukraine and maybe some other isolated instances like Evan's arrest. But again, to Putin, this is this kind of all-encompassing conflict where he's constantly looking for ways he can raise the pressure and look for tactical wins against the U.S. Anton, I want to ask you, as someone who's been covering Russia for many years, who knows the country intimately well, and also as someone who knows Evan, what's going through your head as you're following this trial? The incredible injustice of it all.

The fact that Evan really devoted his professional career, so much of his adult life, to covering Russia, understanding Russia on a journal journalistic level as well as on a personal level. You know, it was just a place that he loved so much, that he was so passionate about. It also makes me think of his parents who fled the Soviet Union, who, you know, were looking to escape the repressive system of that time. And now they're seeing their son, Evan, who was born in America, being repressed by essentially that same system. So this case is not just like this personal drama, and it's not only a geopolitical drama, but it's also kind of a press freedom issue.

You know, Moscow in the not so distant past had an absolutely thriving scene of foreign correspondence. There was so much great journalism coming out of Russia these last decades. And yeah, now it's come to this. Anton, thank you very much. Thank you, Katrin. We'll be right back. Democrats publicly urged him to withdraw from the race. Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas was the first sitting member of Congress to say that Biden's faltering debate performance last week had disqualified him from running again. Others echoed this call.

President Biden should withdraw from this race, but the path ahead requires a new generation of leadership to take our country forward. Adam Frisch, who's running for Congress in Colorado, said that winning the presidential election would require a younger candidate. The Democrats need a new nominee on the ballot in November. We need to recalibrate and we need to do so quickly. Marianne Williamson, who lost to Biden in the primaries, urged Democrats to choose a new candidate at the Democratic Convention in August. The vast majority of Democrats, including party leaders, remained publicly supportive of Biden. And the judge in Donald Trump's hush money trial delayed his sentencing from July to September. He made the decision after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that gives Trump broad immunity

on all official business. Trump, who was found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal during his 2016 presidential campaign, could face up to four years in prison. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug and Alex Stern,

with help from Sydney Harper. It was edited by Lexi Diaw, with help from Brandon Klinkenberg and Paige Cowett. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Alicia by E-Tube. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Milana Mezaya. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wanderley.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Katrin Benhold. See you tomorrow.