Evan Gershkovich Has Been In Prison In Russia For A Year
On the Media
WNYC Studios
4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2024
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Wednesday, March 29 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by the FSB, Russia's security service, and charged with espionage. It was the first time that an American journalist in Russia has been charged with espionage, which carries a potential 20-year prison sentence, since the Cold War. OTM producer Molly Schwartz spoke to Valerie Hopkins, international correspondent for The New York Times, Gordon Fairclough, World Coverage Chief for The Wall Street Journal, Gulnoza Said, the Europe and Central Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and Dan Storyev and Maria Kuznetsova from OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group, about how the Kremlin is using Gershkovich as a pawn in a game of hostage diplomacy.
This is a segment from our April 14, 2023, show Inside Russia's Crackdown on Journalists. The email address mentioned at the end of this piece where people can write Evan Gershkovich letters in prison is [email protected].
Transcript
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| 1:20.0 | Next week will mark one year since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich was detained by Russian authorities. |
| 1:27.0 | He's been held for all that time in Moscow's La Fortova prison, as Russian authorities extend his detention in one trial after another. |
| 1:36.3 | When news broke of Evans' arrest, we aired a piece by O.T.M. producer Molly Rosen, about what the detention of a US reporter means for journalism in Russia. |
| 1:47.1 | For the first months of the war, Valerie Hopkins, a New York Times correspondent who was usually |
| 1:51.8 | based in Moscow, was in Ukraine. Then she |
| 1:54.6 | went back to Moscow to cover the conflict from there. Evan became one of my closest |
| 1:59.6 | friends when I went back after the war started in August, last year, we got very close because it's a very difficult |
| 2:06.4 | environment to work in and at first a lot of people were leaving. |
... |
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