U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia for over a year on espionage accusations he denies, will be tried in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, Russian authorities announced Thursday.
The Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, Urals, and has been detained in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo jail ever since.
According to a statement released by the Prosecutor General’s office, Gershkovich is charged with being a covert CIA operative and “gathering secret information” about Uralvagonzavod, a military equipment production and repair facility in the Sverdlovsk region whose foreman, Igor Kholmanskih, is considered to be a Putin loyalist.
The criminal case against him was forwarded to Sverdlovsk Regional Court in Yekaterinburg “for consideration on its merits,” the statement stated, without specifying the date of the trial.
If found guilty, the 32-year-old could spend up to 20 years behind bars.
Gershovich, the son of Soviet immigrants who settled in New Jersey, was the first U.S. journalist arrested on espionage accusations since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War.
Putin recently expressed a willingness to swap Gershkovich for a Russian national who was being held captive in Germany—Vadim Krasikov – who was incarcerated for life after murdering a Georgian national of Chechen origin in 2019.
