Evan Gershkovich: determined US journalist sentenced by Russia

Evan Gershkovich, a US Wall Street Journal reporter, was sentenced to 16 years in a strict penal colony by a Russian court on Friday, after a fast-track espionage trial condemned by the US as a Kremlin ploy to secure prisoner swaps with the West.

The 32-year-old son of Soviet emigres had reported from Russia for six years and carried on visiting the country even after dozens of other Western journalists left following Moscow's Ukraine offensive.

Russia's critics say his arrest for spying in March 2023 showed the Kremlin was prepared to go further than ever before in what President Vladimir Putin has called a "hybrid war" with the West.

Gershkovich, his employer and the White House have rejected the spying allegations -- the first levelled against a Western reporter in Russia since the Soviet era -- and called the trial a "sham".

Before his trial started last month, he was held for 15 months in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison, known for keeping inmates in isolation.

His case was heard in a closed military court in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, where he was arrested.

At the sentencing on Friday, after a trial that consisted of just three hearings, including closing arguments earlier in the day, Evan stood in a glass cage for defendants at the side of the court in dark trousers and a dark T-Shirt.

He did not appear to react when the judge read the verdict and sentence.

That he would be sentenced to lengthy jail time was a foregone conclusion. Prosecutors had asked for 18 years.

Russia has provided no public evidence for the charges against Gershkovich, saying only that he spied on a tank factory in the Urals region and was working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The Wall Street Journal has dismissed the accusation as bogus, saying he was arrested for "simply doing his job".

Moscow and Washington have both said they are open to exchanging the Wall Street Journal reporter in a deal, but neither has given clues as to when that might happen.

- 'You love this country' -

Raised in New Jersey, Gershkovich is a fluent Russian speaker and avid cook.

He arrived in Russia in 2017 to work for a small English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, and quickly produced some of the outlet's biggest stories on a shoestring budget.

He then worked for AFP, reporting on forest fires in Siberia, a crackdown on the opposition and Moscow downplaying the effects of the Covid pandemic.

Weeks before the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive, he landed his dream job: Moscow correspondent with The Wall Street Journal.

In that role, he reported extensively on how ordinary Russians experienced the Ukraine conflict, speaking to the families of dead soldiers.

Gershkovich's parents fled from repression and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

His mother, Ella Milman, told AFP this year she was initially happy he made a life for himself in a country that she and his father had fled.

"It was amazing," she said. "I told him I left this country and you love this country -- and what a change."

- 'Still standing strong' -

"We never anticipated this situation happening to our son and brother," the Gershkovich family said in a letter published by The Wall Street Journal this year.

"But despite this long battle, we are still standing strong," they added.

Gershkovich himself, too, appears to have preserved his playful sense of humour that friends describe.

In a first hand-written letter out of jail to his parents, he wrote:

"Mom, you unfortunately, for better or worse, prepared me well for jail food."

The US ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, has repeatedly said that Gershkovich is in "good spirits" when she has visited him in jail in Moscow ahead of the trial.

At Lefortovo, an antiquated prison that housed victims of Joseph Stalin's repression, he shared a small cell with another inmate.

- 'Deeply cared' -

He said he got an hour-long walk in a small prison yard every day, tried to stay fit through exercise, and relied on fruit and vegetables sent by friends to supplement the meagre prison diet.

Gershkovich had been keen to carry on reporting from Russia despite an exodus of Western and Russian independent press when the Kremlin launched its "special military operation" in Ukraine.

Friends say his character -- open, gregarious and extremely sociable -- made Gershkovich's reporting even better.

He "could make any source comfortable, because they always felt he deeply cared about the story", close friend Pjotr Sauer said.

His parents have said they are counting on a "very personal" promise from US President Joe Biden to bring him home.

"For me it's devastating to know how much he's missed, how much time he's lost," his sister Danielle told AFP.

"I miss him more and more every day."