How Evan Gershkovich was finally freed after a 500-day odyssey in Russia’s prison system

Evan Gershkovich was on a reporting trip deep in the Russian regions when the FSB came for him. The Wall Street Journal reporter was in Yekaterinburg, more than 850 miles from the Russian capital, when agents approached his table at a local bistro. As they frog-marched him out of the restaurant, the officers pulled Gershkovich’s shirt over his head to obscure his identity, witnesses said. The signal was clear: this was no ordinary arrest.

That began a nearly 500-day odyssey in Russia’s notorious prison system for Gershkovich, the first reporter to be arrested and charged with espionage since the cold war. The Russian government said Gershkovich had been recruited by the CIA to collect information about the country’s larger producer of main battle tanks, Uralvagonzavod.

Gershkovich pleaded not guilty, and the Wall Street Journal as well as the Biden administration have strenuously denied the charges, calling Gershkovich a hostage and pawn in a larger geopolitical game. For his part, Vladimir Putin has barely hidden his true aim: to free a man named Vadim Krasikov, who was until today serving a life sentence for the assassination of a Chechen rebel commander in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

Related: Vadim Krasikov: who is Russian hitman linked to Navalny prisoner swap claim?

In his interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Putin described Krasikov as “a person who eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals, due to patriotic sentiments”. But a little digging into his background suggested Krasikov was likely an elite FSB assassin tasked with murdering Putin’s opponents abroad. He was caught red-handed after the attack, having been spotted by passersby.

“Putin had become maniacal about getting Krasikov back; he really, really wanted Krasikov,” a source with knowledge of Kremlin deliberations on the issue told the Guardian earlier this year. “It was a symbol that we don’t abandon our people. He killed someone for us and we want people like that to know that they will be fought for to get them back.”

Krasikov was central to Putin’s demands, and Gershkovich the most significant prisoner for the White House, but the ensuing year of negotiations pulled in hundreds of other people, including Russian political prisoners and Russian spies held abroad, friends and family to provide support, negotiators on both sides, a Russian billionaire reportedly acting as broker in the exchange, as well as the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny , who died amid rumours that the west had presented Putin with a grand deal to free Krasikov and Gershkovich in a three-way trade back in February.

Speaking from the White House on Thursday, national security advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed that Navalny had been supposed to be part of the deal to release Gershkovich. US officials had proposed his freedom as a sweetener in order to convince Germany to release Krasikov. On the day Navalny died, Sullivan said, he spoke with Gershkovich’s family and said he could still see a path to a deal. That came through approaching US allies in Norway, Poland and Slovenia to provide a number of Russian nationals being held abroad, and seeking the return of other US and German citizens, as well as prominent members of the Russian opposition.

The Wall Street Journal also detailed the exceptional efforts of Gershkovich’s mother Ella, who researched past hostage deals, kept Gershkovich’s case in the news and personally lobbied Joe Biden and other US officials, as well as the German chancellor Olaf Scholz to help free her son.

As Gershkovich finally heads back home to the United States, there are still questions about why specifically he was targeted. His employer’s prominence inside the US and his dogged reporting would be a good place to start. The young reporter had begun focusing his efforts as one of a small number of correspondents to continue working in Russia after the country launched a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022.

In one especially penetrating look at Putin , Gershkovich and his colleagues reported that Putin had been in direct contact with frontline commanders and received a daily briefing on the war at 7am when he woke up. “Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow,” Gershkovich wrote, along with a team of reporters from the Wall Street Journal. “It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.”

It may never be clear if Gershkovich was targeted for specific reporting, or simply because the Kremlin needed a hostage to further negotiations for a prisoner swap with the west, after numerous arrests of high-profile Russian assets and officers.

Gershkovich was born in New Jersey to Soviet-Jewish exiles who had emigrated to the US in 1979, seeking to escape rising antisemitism and restricted life under communist rule.

After nearly two years as a news assistant at The New York Times, Gershkovich in 2017 moved to Moscow and joined the Moscow Times, a small independent English-language outlet that has a history of fostering talented Russian correspondents.

At the beginning of 2022, he was hired as a Moscow-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, a role he described to his friends as his dream job. He reported for the paper until his dramatic arrest in March 2023.

Gershkovich would spend the next 13 months, until the start of his trial, in the notorious tsarist-era Lefortovo prison on the outskirts of Moscow. The prison has a history of housing high-profile inmates, including Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko.

In Lefortovo, where bright lights buzz day and night, Gershkovich would spend 23 hours a day in a 3-by-4-metre cell which he shared with another prisoner, only allowed one hour to walk in one of the cell-sized courtyards on the roof.

Former inmates describe Lefortovo as a high-security facility designed to sow dread, isolation and despair.

Behind bars, his friend said, Gershkovich remained resilient , maintaining a strict daily routine that included morning exercises, reading numerous books and writing upbeat letters to loved ones.

He also played a slow-moving game of chess with his father through the mail and meticulously kept track of his friend’s birthday events, arranging for flowers to be sent through others.

Gershkovich’s arrest set off alarm bells among the foreign reporters left in Moscow. US and UK broadsheets left the country, although TV and European reporters largely stayed. Russian government handlers cajoled reporters to stay in country, telling them in private that Gershkovich’s case was “unique” and urging them not to pay for information, a charge that Gershkovich and the Wall Street Journal have denied.

“He was targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American,” said Joe Biden after Gershkovich was handed down a 16-year sentence earlier this month, following a fast-tracked trial that was designed to speed the way toward a swap. “ Journalism is not a crime ,” the US president said. “We will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.”

Related: Who’s who among the prisoner exchange between Russia and the west?

But the road to a deal would be sown with major complications. Relations between the US and Russia are at their worst since the cold war, as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has left the country an international pariah.

The US had already concluded a series of high-profile swaps with Russia for the marine Trevor Reed and basketball star Brittney Griner , freeing several infamous Russian prisoners including the arms smuggler Viktor Bout .

But in each of those deals, US negotiators had not been able to free the former marine Paul Whelan , who was detained in 2018 on espionage charges and had spent more than five years behind bars in Russia. Putin was personally convinced that Paul Whelan was a spy, according to two European diplomats who have spoken with the Russian leader. And US and European officials have both quietly acknowledged that it was seen as politically impossible to conclude a new deal without bringing Whelan home along with Gershkovich. In order to do that, US secretary of state Antony Blinken proposed broadening the number of people in the deal to German officials, an idea that eventually led to the framework of a deal that would also free Navalny, who had undergone medical treatment in Germany after he was poisoned in 2020.

But in February, Navalny died under mysterious circumstances in a prison colony above the Arctic Circle. Days later, his ally Maria Pevchikh released a video titled “Why did Putin kill Navalny now?” The deal that has been struck this week follows similar contours. In place of Navalny, Western negotiators have freed a number of Russian political prisoners, including protest leader Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza , a British-Russian critic of Putin who had been instrumental in lobbying western governments for harsher sanctions against the Putin regime. Whelan was also among the Americans free, as well as Alsu Kurmasheva.

Putin, in turn, has managed to return a number of high-profile Russian spies, including a number of “illegals”, intelligence officers who take on fake foreign personas rather than operating under diplomatic cover. And he has freed Krasikov, whom it is rumoured that he met personally at a shooting range when the hitman served in the highly secretive Vympel unit of Russia’s secret service.

Related: US reacts to major prisoner swap with Russia: ‘feat of diplomacy’ and ‘joyous’

Some in Washington indicated on Thursday that the deal would be the target of significant criticism. Donald Trump has already criticised the deal, writing: “Are we releasing murderers, killers or thugs? Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps.” And a US official briefed on the talks said that they were “happy for the families but we are releasing some very bad people.”

In the days before Navalny’s death, Putin’s insistence that a deal could be struck grew louder. In an interview with Tucker Carlson in February, he described Krasikov as “a man sitting in one country, an ally of the United States, who, for patriotic reasons, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals”.

Putin didn’t mention Krasikov by name, but he did in effect portend the trade that came to fruition this week.

“I do not exclude that the person you mentioned, Mr Gershkovich, may end up in his homeland,” he said. “Why not? It’s pointless to more or less keep him in prison in Russia. But let the colleagues of our intelligence officers on the American side also think about how to solve the problems that our special services face.”