After spending nearly 16 months in detention in the basement of what used to be the KGB’s headquarters at Lefortovo prison, Wall Street Journal reporter and American citizen Evan Gershkovich was sentenced by a Russian court to 16 years in a maximum-security prison on charges related to espionage. But what Moscow pretends is spycraft, rational observers would call journalism. The Russian court has failed to produce any supporting evidence substantiating its claims against Gershkovich. It’s a state secret, you see.
Gershkovich’s detention and conviction isn’t justice. It’s hostage-taking, which has become a profitable enterprise for the Kremlin in the Biden era.
Russia took Women’s National Basketball Association player Brittney Griner into custody on far more defensible charges of narcotics possession, but it was her status as an American citizen — not her alleged offense — that made her a valuable token to the Russian government. Despite what her attorneys claimed was procedural malfeasance during her trial, Griner was found guilty and received the near-maximum sentence to up the ante in negotiations over her fate with the United States. In the end, the Biden administration secured Griner’s freedom, but only at the cost of freeing a notorious arms dealer (so notorious, in fact, that he was the inspiration for the 2005 Nicolas Cage film Lord of War) and a former FSB agent serving a life sentence in a German prison for assassinating a Chechen rebel living in Berlin.
The lopsided nature of the deal — an illegal weapons merchant and a hitman in exchange for a basketball player — was very telling. Griner’s cause became a celebrity fashion, which likely propelled her to the front of the line in hostage talks with Moscow over onetime U.S. security contractor Paul Whelan, who has languished in Russian custody since 2018. Whelan was sentenced to 16 years in a Russian jail for having a thumb drive in his possession that local authorities allege contained classified information. The United States disagrees. Like Gershkovich, officials in Washington maintain that Whelan was “wrongfully detained,” and talks over his status have stalled. Whelan told reporters in May that he had “a bit of a concern” that Russia’s recent detention of U.S. soldier who traveled to Russia to visit his girlfriend without permission could further complicate his case. Whelan was right to worry.
Staff Sergeant Gordon Black was detained for what Russian authorities insisted would be only about two months, but, in June, he was sentenced to serve nearly four years in a Russian penal colony for what prosecutors allege was Black’s assault on and attempt to steal $120 from his Russian girlfriend. The list of American captives in Russian custody continues to grow.
The injustices the Russian justice system has meted out to Gershkovich, Whelan, and others aren’t just expressions of the Kremlin’s desire to inflict pain on the American government. Their mistreatment serves Moscow’s geopolitical interests. That should be enough to convince Americans to avoid all travel to Russia, not just to preserve their freedom but to avoid putting their own government in the unenviable position of having to sacrifice leverage over the Kremlin just to get its citizens back.
Gershkovich’s ordeal is particularly infuriating. The abuse imposed on a reporter on assignment just so he might serve, as a National Security Council spokesman described it, as “a bargaining chip” is grotesque. If little else, Gershkovich’s torment illustrates the lengths Vladimir Putin’s regime is willing to go in its effort to impose pain on the United States.