Russian court rejects Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against detention

A Moscow court upheld the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich at the prison where he has been held since his arrest last month.

US journalist Evan Gershkovich, arrested on espionage charges, stands inside a defendants' cage before a hearing to consider an appeal on his arrest at the Moscow City Court in Moscow on Tuesday night. Picture: AFP

A Moscow court upheld the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich at the prison where he has been held since his arrest last month.

Mr Gershkovich’s lawyers, Tatyana Nozhkina and Maria Korchagina of the ZKS law firm, had challenged his detention nearly three weeks after the American journalist was detained during a reporting trip and held on an allegation of espionage that the Journal and the US government vehemently deny.

The Moscow City Court on Tuesday ruled against moving Mr Gershkovich to another jail, allowing him house arrest or granting him bail.

The ruling means Mr Gershkovich will remain in pretrial detention at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison until May 29, although Russian authorities can extend that period.

Mr Gershkovich appeared at the hearing, standing inside a see-through detention box, according to footage of the proceedings shown on Russian state television. He wore jeans and a blue-checkered shirt.

At times he paced inside the detention box, moving toward Lynne Tracy, the US ambassador to Moscow, who stood in the courtroom nearby.

The hearing follows the US State Department’s decision last week to designate Mr Gershkovich as wrongfully detained, a status that officially commits the government to seeking his release.

A day earlier, Ms Tracy visited Mr Gershkovich at Lefortovo, the first access to him provided to US officials since his detention on March 29.

“He is in good health and remains strong,” Ms Tracy said. “We reiterate our call for his immediate release.”

Mr Gershkovich was accredited to work as a journalist in Russia by the country’s Foreign Ministry at the time of his detention while reporting in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, about 1200km east of Moscow. On April 7, he was formally charged with espionage.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, said the journalist “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex”.

A conviction in the case carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Virtually all espionage trials in Russia end in a guilty verdict.

Mr Gershkovich’s arrest has spurred international condemnation. US President Joe Biden has called the arrest “totally illegal”. Former US vice-president Mike Pence has called on the Biden administration to expel Russian diplomats.

In a video interview with the Journal published on Friday, Mr Gershkovich’s parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US decades ago, expressed optimism that their son would eventually be released.

“It’s one of the American qualities that we absorbed, you know, be optimistic, believe in [a] happy ending,” Ms. Milman said in the video.

On Friday, she received a letter to the family that her son hand wrote in Russian from prison.

“I want to say that I am not losing hope,” Mr. Gershkovich wrote in the two-page correspondence.

The Wall Street Journal