Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has spent more than a year in a Kremlin prison, will stand trial on charges of espionage, Russian authorities said Thursday.
Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office announced that an indictment against the American journalist has been finalized, with his case filed at the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city in the Ural Mountains.
He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” about a facility in the Sverdlovsky region that produced and repaired military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said.
The reporter and the WSJ have vehimently denied the allegations. Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.
The Russian officials, once again, failed to provide any evidence to back up the allegations on Thursday.
Gershkovich was on a reporting trip to o Yekaterinburg in March 2023 when he was arrested and accused of spying for the US to gather Russian secrets.
On the one-year anniversary of Gershkovich’s arrest last month, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher Almar Latour called on President Biden to “push extra hard” for a prisoner exchange or a deal that would get his reporter back home.
Experts believe that Gershkovich is being used as a bargaining chip amid the strained relationship between Russia and the West over its invasion of Ukraine, with the US serving as a major supplier of aid for Kyiv.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson earlier this year that Russia was considering a prisoner swap with the US.
Gershkovich is the first American reporter arrested on espionage charges in Russia since 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for US News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB.
Unlike Gershkovich, Daniloff was released without charge 20 days later in a deal for an employee of the Soviet Union’s UN mission who was arrested by the FBI.
With Post wires