Evan Gershkovich, the Russia reporter who became the story

By Felix Light and Mark Trevelyan

(Reuters) - Evan Gershkovich landed what he told friends he regarded as a dream assignment in Moscow in 2022 - reporting for a famous newspaper on one of the world's top stories, at the age of just 31.

But the new job turned into a hellish ordeal when Gershkovich became the first American journalist since the Cold War to be arrested in Russia with investigators accusing him of collecting sensitive military information for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a charge he and his employer denied.

During the 16 months he was held, The Wall Street Journal reporter became a Kremlin bargaining chip as President Vladimir Putin held out the prospect of exchanging him in a deal with Washington.

Initially kept in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo jail, a Russian court handed him a 16-year sentence in a rushed and secret trial in July 2024 after convicting him of trying to gather military secrets about a tank factory that is central to Russia's war machine.

His employer and the U.S. government said he was innocent and had been subjected to a sham trial. The Kremlin maintained he had been caught spying "red-handed."

Gershkovich's fate played out against the background of the war in Ukraine which, in the Kremlin's words, had plunged relations with the United States to "below zero".

On Thursday, the Turkish presidency said Gershkovich was being freed as part of a major east-west prisoner swap involving 26 people.

During his time in jail, Gershkovich, a literature and philosophy graduate, kept himself going by reading Russian classics such as Vasily Grossman's "Life and Fate", an epic novel set during World War Two. In his cell, he followed events via a TV which showed only Russian state television channels.

In his regular correspondence with the outside world, Gershkovich poked fun at his life in jail. His chief request remained gossip from friends and colleagues.

One email account, set up by friends and colleagues to forward messages of support from wellwishers via Russia's prison correspondence system, received thousands of letters addressed to Gershkovich during his imprisonment.

His contact with the outside world was largely restricted to court hearings where he stood inside a glass cage and exchanged smiles with fellow reporters. He was allowed to speak in the courtroom when his parents Ella and Mikhail, former Soviet citizens who left for the United States in the late 1970s, flew back to Moscow for a hearing to support their son.

Gershkovich, now 32, is a New Jersey native who learned Russian from his parents.

After graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, he was hired as an assistant at the New York Times before moving to Russia in 2017 to work for the English-language Moscow Times newspaper and then for the French news agency Agence France-Presse.

During his years in Moscow, Gershkovich honed his knowledge of a language he said had been patchy before leaving America. Summers were spent at a dacha country house in the forest west of Moscow, while he kept warm during Russia's winters at the capital's steamy bathhouses.

CAREER BREAKTHROUGH

Gershkovich got the career break he craved in January 2022 when the Wall Street Journal hired him. He was just weeks into his posting when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 of that year.

For the next 13 months, he wrote about a country at war, where soldiers were beginning to come home in body bags and the Kremlin was cracking down hard on dissent.

"Reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years," he posted on Twitter five months after the war began.

Based in London and periodically visiting Moscow for reporting trips, he was one of a few Western journalists to continue to travel there as new laws imposed stiff prison sentences for anyone found guilty of "discrediting" the armed forces or spreading false information about them.

Gershkovich wrote stories on Putin's inner circle, the Wagner Group mercenary army, and the shift of the economy to a war footing.

Then on March 29, 2023, during a trip to the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, he was arrested while dining in a restaurant. The FSB security service said he had been collecting information about Uralvagonzavod, a factory that makes tanks for the Ukraine war.

Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal and the White House all denied he was a spy, or had ever worked for the U.S. government. President Joe Biden called his detention "totally illegal" and the United States designated him as "wrongfully detained."

News of Gershkovich's release followed months of speculation, fuelled by Putin, that Moscow was ready to strike a deal if the terms were right.

"I do not exclude that the person you mentioned, Mr. Gershkovich, may end up back in his homeland. Why not? It makes no sense, more or less, to keep him in jail in Russia," Putin told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview that was aired on Feb. 8.

Almost six months later, Gershkovich was on his way back to the United States.

(Reporting by Felix Light and Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Philippa Fletcher)