‘Hello From Sunny Moscow’: My Year of Letters with Evan Gershkovich

Over the past year, I have been exchanging letters with my old friend Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who, as of today, has been held hostage on baseless espionage charges in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison for exactly a year. We first met in college and grew closer after graduation, as we both got our start in professional journalism and traded thoughts about reporting from abroad. He loved doing the work that has now led him to a Russian cell. I type up my letters via email and, weeks or months later, receive photographs of Evan’s handwritten responses, his Russian script sometimes hurried, his sign-offs upbeat and warm. Each letter passes through several pairs of hands on its way to me: prison censors read everything that goes into and out of Lefortovo, and all correspondence is in Russian so that the censors can read it. Every time a new one arrives, it bears Evan’s unmistakable touch. I imagine how the words would sound in his voice, how he would laugh and joke if we were in the same place. “Hello from sunny Moscow!” he wrote to me recently. He has always had a sense of humor.

Today marks an anniversary that I hoped would never come. Evan is the first American journalist to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since 1986, when the U.S. News and World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow. Daniloff was held in Lefortovo for 21 days, and, after a flurry of diplomatic activity, was released without charges and allowed to return home. If there was some hope, when Evan was first arrested, that his detention would be similarly brief, it has now vanished. Now we can only hope that another year will not be allowed to pass before he is freed.

On Tuesday, Evan appeared in the Moscow City Court for yet another pre-trial hearing during which his unjust detention was upheld and extended until at least June 30. It was his 12th court appearance since this ordeal began, the latest in a string of extensions of his unlawful arrest. Each time he appears in court, we see photographs and videos of him standing in a glass cage, subjected to a legal system in which, as one legal scholar put it, “the process [is] part of the punishment.” We scan to see if he seems healthy, if he looks tired. He smiles, because he is Evan and his garrulousness and charm have no bounds, but it is hard not to think that he misses his family and friends, that he is thinking about when he will be able to return home, that he is just holding up as best as he can.

To date, the U.S. has presented several proposals for potential prisoner swaps that would bring Evan home. Each one has been rejected, though the Kremlin said this week that discussions over a potential swap are ongoing. In public remarks and interviews, Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that a successful swap would involve Vadim Krasikov, a former FSB colonel and hitman who is currently serving a life sentence in Germany for killing a Chechen dissident in Berlin’s Tiergarten park in 2019. Krasikov’s name also came up in potential discussions about a three-way swap that would have freed Evan and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. marine who has been imprisoned in Russia for over five years, as well as the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. After Navalny was killed last month in an Arctic penal colony, his team suggested that his death had been timed to interrupt the swap. But as Julia Ioffe has reported in Puck, no formal offer involving Navalny and Krasikov was ever on the table. German officials have not commented on the situation, and one fears they may be reluctant to free a convicted Russian killer in their custody as a favor to the U.S.

All this diplomatic chatter has only further confirmed what we have known all along: that Evan was arrested so that he could serve as a bargaining chip for Moscow, that he was selected as the latest victim of the Kremlin’s game of “hostage diplomacy,” and that he is being cynically held on false espionage charges so that Putin can try to get one of his favorite hitmen back.

The Russia that Evan loved reporting on, living in, and traveling around, is not the same Russia that exists today. His arrest marked a harsh turn for foreign journalists in the country; last week, the Spanish El Mundo correspondent Xavier Colás was given 24 hours to leave Russia, where he had reported for over a decade. Police had reportedly warned him to stop covering anti-war protests. The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual national of the U.S. and Russia, was arrested in Russia in May and faces up to five years in prison. Russian independent media exists almost entirely in exile, and private citizens risk arrest for an expanding list of crimes. The Russian carceral state is gradually swallowing up every individual who dares to dissent against the regime, including those whose only offense was to lay flowers at Navalny’s grave. The Kremlin’s punitive tactics, both domestically and abroad, reflect a sense of international impunity.

Over the past several years, Russia has largely set the terms by which prisoner swaps are conducted, a situation that has bred frustration among the families of the detainees who get left behind along the way. In 2022, U.S. Marine Trevor Reed was swapped for the Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who had been sentenced to 20 years on drug smuggling charges. Later that year, the WNBA star Brittney Griner was swapped for the international arms dealer Viktor Bout in a one-to-one deal that the U.S. had initially resisted. Both deals conspicuously excluded Whelan.

Now, the Kremlin appears determined to get Krasikov back, a desire that Putin has seemingly reiterated in public comments. That means that getting Evan and Paul home, in the absence of other options, could require a three-way prisoner swap — a more complex undertaking than prior deals. It is a small balm to know that talks about a swap are ongoing. But it is heartbreaking to consider how easily they could fall through.

In the meantime, I have Evan’s letters. They’re great, but they are not enough.