Free these wrongly jailed journalists from Russian prisons

Russia, in the grip of President Vladimir Putin, has been a leading jailer of journalists, with at least 22 of them “behind bars for their work as of late 2023,” according to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. Clustered along with Russia toward the top of the CPJ’s incarceration list are China, Myanmar, Belarus and Vietnam. Israel, amid the Gaza war, rose to sixth place, tied with Iran, each with 17 media people held, the organization said. Circumstances and specifics differ, of course, by news organization, government, and beats covered.

Now the highest-profile case is turning a year old.  Evan Gershkovich , a 32-year-old U.S. citizen based in Moscow as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been detained in Russia last since March 29 on espionage charges that he, his newspaper, and the U.S. government strongly deny. If spuriously convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

Current elders of the Kremlin should know as well as anyone that this crude nonsense won’t keep true stories that might embarrass the government or its oligarchs from reaching the public. Thus the “Free Evan” meme and movement continue.

Gershkovich has lived in Russia for six years. The Russian Foreign Ministry accredited him. He has reported on the war in Ukraine and Moscow’s repression of the anti-war movement. When Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, announced Gershkovich’s detention on claims he tried to pry out information on the nation’s military-industrial complex, it was the first such instance since the dark days of the Cold War. Various news organizations have been demanding his release, not knowing whether their personnel could be next. Last April 11, the U.S. State Department designated Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained.” The Biden administration has tried, so far without success, to exert pressure to free him.

What will happen? When would he be tried? What’s the timetable? That’s all vague — in the tradition of the FSB, the successor of Russia’s infamous KGB. Perhaps Putin's latest acclamation of a “landslide” election victory can inspire him to lead with less paranoia?

As if holding Gershkovich wasn’t squalid enough, a second U.S. journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, was arrested in October and ordered into pretrial detention, charged with failing to register herself as a foreign agent, punishable by five years. Kurmasheva, 46, an editor for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir Service, resides in Prague with her husband and two kids and traveled to western Russia last May to visit her elderly mother. She holds both American and Russian citizenship. A request late last year for U.S. consular officials to visit her was denied. Her husband was in Washington recently appealing to officials to do more for her release.

As with Gershkovich, the jailing of Kurmasheva is as absurd as it is unnecessary. The U.S. must chip away to get them both freed.