Russia starts US journalist Evan Gershkovich’s trial: What’s next for him?
Al Jazeera
The reporter was arrested in March last year on a reporting trip in Russia’s Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist with the Wall Street Journal, appeared in a court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on Wednesday, at the start of a trial on spying charges in the first espionage case involving a foreign journalist since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gershkovich appeared for the trial in a glass cage, his head shaven clean, wearing a black-and-blue plaid shirt. The hearing, which is being held behind closed doors, will focus on Moscow’s charges that the reporter acted as a United States agent who “collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex” while on a reporting trip in March last year. He denies any wrongdoing. If found guilty, Gershkovich could face up to 20 years in prison, Russian state-run news agency TASS said.
The US administration and the Wall Street Journal have repeatedly denied the accusations. Speaking to reporters last week, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Gershkovich “should have never been arrested in the first place”, adding that the charges were “completely bogus”. In effect, the US is treating Gershkovich as a political hostage. Miller added that US officials were working to try to attend the trial.
The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, the newspaper’s publisher, have also vehemently rejected Russian claims.
“Evan Gershkovich is facing a false and baseless charge,” WSJ Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker said in a statement on June 13. “Russia’s latest move toward a sham trial is, while expected, deeply disappointing and still no less outrageous,” she added.
