Although Gershkovich is often seen smiling in the brief appearances in court, friends and family say he finds it hard to face a wall of cameras pointing at him as if he were an animal in a zoo
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich stands behind a glass wall of an enclosure for defendants as he attends a court hearing to consider extending his detention in Moscow on March 26.Guards take the American journalist from the notorious Lefortovo Prison in a van for the short drive to the courthouse. He’s led in handcuffs to a defendants’ cage in front of a judge for yet another hearing about his pretrial detention on espionage charges.
“It’s always a mixed feeling. I’m happy to see him and that he’s doing well, but it’s a reminder that he is not with us. We want him at home,” Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, told The Associated Press. When Gershkovich was arrested a year ago – the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War – it came as a shock, even though Russia had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after the invasion of Ukraine.
Gershkovich is not allowed phone calls and wakes up “every morning to the same gray prison wall. … To think that he’s been doing that every day for the past year is just horrible,” said his friend, Polina Ivanova of the Financial Times. Mikhail Gershkovich writes his son about chess strategy because his cellmate doesn’t like the game. They also discuss artificial intelligence because “he wants to be current when he comes back,” his father said.The Biden administration is seeking the release of Gershkovich, who faces 20 years in prison. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said it would consider a prisoner swap – but only after a verdict in his trial, which has not yet begun.
U.S. officials made an offer to swap Gershkovich last year that was rejected by Russia, and the Biden administration has not made public any possible deals since then., Gershkovich wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years.”
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