A Moscow court on Tuesday denied American journalist Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against the extension of his pre-trial detention in the spying case that he and the U.S. government have rejected as bogus and politically motivated.
Gershkovich, a Russia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has been jailed since March 2023 on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny. The State Department has declared him wrongfully detained.
The Journal condemned the latest ruling, which will see Gershkovich held in pre-trial detention until at least June 30.
“It continues to be outrageous that Evan has been wrongfully detained by the Russian government for more than a year,” the paper said in a statement. “Evan’s freedom is long overdue, and we urge the administration to do everything in their power to secure his release.”
The Tuesday hearing was a technical appeal against an earlier decision to re-extend Gershkovich’s pre-trial detention until the end of June. To date, Russian investigators have not publicly provided any evidence to substantiate the accusations made against Gershkovich.
“The first court of appeal ruled that the order of 26 March 2024 on the extension of the preventative measure should be left unchanged,” Judge Alexander Pushkin said in Tuesday’s hearing, according to an AFP journalist who was present at the hearing.
Gershkovich, who was accredited by Russia’s foreign ministry to work there as a journalist, has spent more than one year jailed in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. Washington has accused Moscow of holding the American journalist hostage and using him as a political pawn.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, last visited Gershkovich in prison on April 18.
“Despite the continued wait for the start of his trial, Evan remains in good spirits, buoyed by the continued messages of support,” the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said in a statement.
During the Tuesday hearing, Gershkovich smiled and gave a thumbs-up when a journalist asked him how he was doing.
Last week, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a bipartisan resolution calling for Gershkovich’s immediate release. The resolution “strongly reaffirms that journalism should never be silenced by persecution or intimidation,” Senator Ben Cardin, from Maryland, said in a statement.
Earlier this month, Roger Carstens, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, told reporters that the U.S. government is in the process of putting together a new offer for Moscow to secure the release of Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, another American considered wrongfully detained in Russia.
Also this month, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters that Moscow and Washington are using “a specialized closed channel” to discuss prisoner swaps that could include Gershkovich, according to the Russian state outlet TASS.
Russian President Vladimir Putin previously suggested that Moscow would be willing to trade Gershkovich for a Russian operative currently jailed in Germany for killing a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park in 2019.
At the end of 2023, Russia ranked fourth in the world in terms of journalist jailings with 22 behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Gershkovich is one of two American journalists jailed in Russia. The other is Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian national who has been jailed since October 2023.
An editor at the Tatar-Bashkir service of VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Kurmasheva stands accused of failing to register as a so-called “foreign agent” and spreading what the Kremlin views as false information about the Russian military. Kurmasheva and her employer vehemently deny the charges against her, which carry a combined sentence of 15 years in prison.
U.S. officials have said the charges against Kurmasheva are groundless. But the State Department has still not decided whether it will declare Kurmasheva wrongfully detained, despite persistent calls from press freedom groups for the State Department to do so.
Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse.
