Telling Russia: Imprisoned American journalist Evan Gershkovich has built a reputation in six years as an intrepid all-terrain reporter, determined to candidly describe a country reshaped by the conflict in Ukraine. Despite the risks. Accused of espionage, which he firmly denies, the correspondent of wall street journal The 31-year-old has been detained since the end of March in an unprecedentedly serious case against a foreign journalist. He faces twenty years in prison and is due to appear on Tuesday at an appeal hearing against his pre-trial detention.
Unlike many American journalists who left Russia in the wake of the offensive against Ukraine, Evan Gershkovich, a son of Soviet emigrants, had chosen to continue to come and report. There he multiplied the articles telling how the Russians experience the conflict, talking with relatives of killed soldiers, with critics of Vladimir Putin, or even writing about the state of the economy, after a year of sanctions. “I do not lose hope,” he said in a letter to his parents from prison and published by the Wall Street Journal.
According to his mother, Ella Milman, interviewed by this media, Evan decided to continue his work in Russia despite the risks because for him it was a “duty” to continue to tell about this ever more closed country. When arrested in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals, he appeared to be working on the arms industry and the paramilitary group Wagner. The whole of the legal file being classified secret, it is in the state impossible to know what is reproached exactly to the journalist.