A court has convicted Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), of spreading false information about the Russian army and sentenced her to 6½ years in prison after a secret trial, court records and officials said on Monday, July 22.
The conviction in the city of Kazan came on Friday, the same day that a court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison in a case that the US called politically motivated.
Kurmasheva, a 47-year-old editor for RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir service, was convicted of "spreading false information" about the military, according to the website of the Supreme Court of Tatarstan. Court spokesperson Natalya Loseva confirmed to The Associated Press (AP) by phone that Kurmasheva was sentenced to 6½ in prison in a case classified as secret, with no details available of the nature of the accusations against her.
Asked Monday about the verdict, RFE/RL President and CEO Stephen Capus denounced the trial and conviction of Kurmasheva "a mockery of justice." "The only just outcome is for Alsu to be immediately released from prison by her Russian captors," he said in a statement. "It’s beyond time for this American citizen, our dear colleague, to be reunited with her loving family," Capus said in a statement to the AP.
Kurmasheva, who holds US and Russian citizenship and lives in Prague with her husband and two daughters, was taken into custody in October 2023 and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military. Later, she was also charged with spreading "false information" about the Russian military under legislation that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war in Ukraine that deviates from the Kremlin line.
Kurmasheva was initially stopped in June 2023 at Kazan International Airport after traveling to Russia the previous month to visit her ailing elderly mother. Officials confiscated her US and Russian passports and fined her for failing to register her US passport. She was waiting for her passports to be returned when she was arrested on new charges in October that year. RFE/RL has repeatedly called for her release.
RFE/RL was told by Russian authorities in 2017 to register as a foreign agent, but it has challenged Moscow’s use of foreign agent laws in the European Court of Human Rights. The organization has been fined millions of dollars by Russia. In February, RFE/RL was outlawed in Russia as an undesirable organization.
Arrests of Americans are increasingly common in Russia, with nine US citizens known to be detained there as tensions between the two countries have escalated over fighting in Ukraine. The swift and secretive trials of Kurmasheva and Gershkovich in Russia’s highly politicized legal system raised hopes for a possible prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington.