As the U.S. presses for Moscow to release detained American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Russian state media are pushing the official narrative that he is a spy.
Gershkovich, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was detained in the eastern city of Yekaterinburg on March 29 and accused of espionage. He was formally charged with spying on Friday, according to Russian news agencies. Gershkovich, his lawyers and his employer deny the charges.
But Russian audiences are being presented with a different narrative that claims Gershkovich was never a journalist at all.
Gershkovich had worked as a reporter in Russia since 2017, and in the U.S. before that.
At the time of his arrest, Gershkovich was on assignment and had official media accreditation issued by the government.
He is the first American correspondent since the Cold War to be detained on espionage accusations in Russia.
The White House has called for his immediate release and American and international newsrooms and media rights groups have written to the Russian ambassador to the U.S. calling for Gershkovich to be freed.
More than 200 Russian journalists and activists signed an open letter dated Tuesday calling on the Kremlin to release the reporter.
Their letter dismissed the charges against Gershkovich and said that even though Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, have provided no evidence to back up the claims, “it expects us to take its investigators at its word.”
But Russian state-run media have a different story.
In a March 31 news clip on the Russia 1 Channel, Evgeny Popov, host of a popular state-funded show, repeated Kremlin officials’ line that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed.”
“In the West, they described the failed mission of U.S. intelligence as hostage-taking,” Popov said, before introducing Maria Zakharova, the director of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ press department.
Zakharova claimed Gershkovich “engaged in activities totally unrelated to journalism.”
Gulnoza Said, a Russia expert at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said state journalists are just repeating the Kremlin line.
“What’s been most horrifying, although not surprising, is that these media outlets and high-level government officials already decided that Gershkovich is guilty, as if there is no presumption of innocence guaranteed by the Russian constitution and other laws,” Said told VOA.
Other analysts have noted a deference to the FSB in the coverage and commentary coming from Russian state media.
“It’s framed as, ‘Trust Russia’s FSB. They know what they are doing. He’s a spy,’” said Nika Aleksejeva, who researches Russian disinformation at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“If they would elaborate on the story, it would make it more obvious that they are not secure in their rightfulness to detain him,” Aleksejeva told VOA.
She believes that Russian state media have taken the FSB’s espionage claim at face value to help legitimize it, adding that “Kremlin media is very cold-blooded about the story.”
“The narrative that calls him a spy is the most prevalent because audiences are not surprised if a journalist turns out to be a spy. There is just no need to label him as ‘gay,’ ‘extremist’ or anything else,” Aleksejeva said, referring to labels commonly used to discredit or smear critical voices in Russia. “‘Spy’ is bad enough.”
Russia’s Washington embassy did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.
Before his arrest, Gershkovich was reporting on how the Russian economy is crumbling under the weight of Western sanctions.
That topic is especially sensitive to the Kremlin, according to Julia Davis, the founder of Russian Media Monitor, which tracks Russian state TV.
“Their response was to arrest him and at the same time to discredit him,” Davis told VOA. “There has been this consistent line of propaganda across different networks — and that includes government officials like Maria Zakharova from the Foreign Affairs Ministry — and that line is to portray him as having not been a journalist at all.”
The lies are brazen, and that’s intended as a warning for other foreign reporters still in Russia, as well as a message for the West, according to Davis.
“One of the goals is to silence anyone within Russia who would dare to report on similar topics, to tell them that if they do, they will be considered a spy,” she said. “And the other message is certainly directed at the West, trying to show them that they’re powerless to stop them from doing whatever they want to, to Western journalists.”
Said of CPJ believes the goal “is to silence Gershkovich.” After he was taken into custody, however, The Wall Street Journal eliminated the paywall for Gershkovich’s reporting so that readers can easily access his coverage.
Russian state media’s coverage of Gershkovich is likely to convince Russian viewers that Gershkovich is indeed a spy, Said added, which may make it even harder for the few remaining foreign journalists in Russia to speak with sources on the ground.
“It’s safe to say that Russia is fully back to the Stalinist era when they assumed by default that every foreign journalist is a spy,” Said told VOA. “Ordinary people are going to be more scared to speak to foreign correspondents.”
Davis said that even though Gershkovich’s articles are what likely led to his arrest, some Russian reports have gone so far as to say that Gershkovich didn’t write any at all.
“They really went above and beyond here to describe a legitimate journalist as someone who isn’t even a journalist,” Davis said. “This was particularly shameless and sinister, even for them.”
A Moscow court last week ordered Gershkovich to be held in pre-trial detention until May 29. The journalist is appealing that order and a court is scheduled to hear the case on April 18, according to Interfax News.
The hearing will be behind closed doors because of the nature of the charges, Reuters reported.
U.S. National Security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Thursday it was “inexcusable” that the U.S. has not been allowed consular access to Gershkovich, and that the U.S. is working through its Moscow embassy with the Russians on the case. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the reporter’s lawyers had been permitted to meet with him for the first time earlier that day.
In a rare joint statement Friday, Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell condemned Gershkovich’s “wrongful detention” and called for his immediate release.
“Let there be no mistake: journalism is not a crime,” the statement said. “We demand the baseless, fabricated charges against Mr. Gershkovich be dropped and he be immediately released and reiterate our condemnation of the Russian government’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish independent journalists and civil society voices.”
