Evan Gershkovich Detention
Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich, arrested back in March for spying appeared briefly in a Russian court, to have his pre-trial detention extended until at least August.
His prosecution is inhuman and President Putin should immediately stop this charade by the Russian Security Services prosecuting an innocent journalist.
For months the Russians have blocked visits by American diplomats to see Gershkovich, which is his basic right as a foreign citizen.
Yesterday his parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, who fled the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and settled in the US, were in Moscow for the court hearing.
The arrest of Gershkovich is outrageous from the beginning, as the Kremlin knows he is an established journalist, doing his job reporting on Russia.
As a former Moscow based Correspondent for American and Canadian TV, I was based in Russia from 1998 to 2010, and I know the Kremlin didn’t like all our reporting.
Their FSB followed us, bugged our apartments and phones, and even tried to trap reporters in compromising situations. In those days our cars were still marked with mandatory yellow instead of the usual white license plate, with a ‘K’ for Correspondent so we could easily be seen travelling.
But in general we were free to speak to anyone we pleased, including having coffees with people who worked in the Kremlin including spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and our regular visits to opposition groups that weren’t seen as a threat.
I reported on the Russian military in Chechnya without fear of arrest or detention.
And I even visited former nuclear missile plants, where nuclear warheads were being decommissioned and there was no penalty or harassment because Russian had tried to embrace freedom and some form of democracy, however controlled that would be to keep Putin in power.
The worst they should have done to Gershkovich, was to ask him to leave Russia and withdraw his foreign reporting credentials, as they have done in the past to the likes of BBC News and others.
But the security services, once held back from this kind of extreme action by a once more open and even liberal Kremlin, chose to prosecute him, no doubt as a way of penalizing America for it’s support of Ukraine and to silence other foreign news agencies still working in Russia.
The fact is most foreign bureaus have shuttered their operations now, or advised their reporters not to leave Moscow, for fear they too could be arrested on fake charges when they venture out into the regions.
In return Russia was once afforded international coverage, not only of it’s role in international affairs, but also its arts and culture, and economy.
For Russia in the 1990’s and after 2000 it meant it hosted one of the largest foreign contingents of journalists in the World, which gave it a voice on a World stage equal only to Washington and perhaps Beijing.
Imagine this is the same Kremlin that once cared about its image in the West, and in 2006 hired Ketchum, a US-based PR firm, to advise on communications.
President Putin can still stop this decent into paranoid crazy by blocking the arrests and prosecutions of journalists by the Russian Security Service, and give Russia back it’s international voice by protecting foreign reporters.
Just release Gershkovich, and ask him to leave the country if that’s what’s deemed in Russia’s interests, but stop the prosecution now.
Releasing Gershkovich wouldn’t be a favour to the West, nor would it be a concession, it would be in Russia’s interests to protect and defend it’s own international voice, and the Kremlin needs to act immediately and put an end this circus.
Dana Lewis