Sentence shows evil of Putin rule

The cruel charade in Moscow on Friday that saw Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment in a gulag reflects the evil that pervades Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. The manifestly bogus charge against Gershkovich, 32, a US citizen, following his arrest and incarceration in March 2023, was that he spied for the CIA. Not a tittle of evidence was produced to back that claim before Russia’s supine judges, after closed-door hearings, announced their preposterous, preordained verdict.

Like so-called elections in Russia, court trials routinely end with the result the dictator has demanded. Foregone, pre-ordered judgments reek of the machinery of Joseph Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. Gershkovich, showing what Ernest Hemingway might have termed admirable “grace under pressure”, is the latest innocent victim of Russia’s notorious business model of taking hostages and holding them to trade for Russian spies or criminals held legitimately in the West. Gershkovich has shown immense courage, persistently rejecting pressure to escape his nightmare by pleading guilty to the bogus charges.

Reports following his sentencing indicate possible Russian “interest” in gaining the release of a so-called Russian “patriot” – Vadim Krasikov, a Putin spy serving life in Germany for the murder of an exiled Chechen dissident in Berlin’s Tiergarten. By any civilised reckoning, Krasikov is a murdering thug; that’s what Germany’s courts found. To Putin, however, he is “a person who due to patriotic sentiments eliminated a bandit’’. Gershkovich’s Kafka-esque nightmare, understandably, has sent a chill through the sizeable corps of foreign reporters covering Russia. The extreme danger of doing what he did – diligently report the truth about Russia in a time of war – is clear. In a White House statement, Joe Biden said Gershkovich “was targeted by the Russian government because he was a journalist and an American”. That conjunction has immense significance at a time when Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Iran’s ayatollahs perceive Western weakness.

Adversaries, The Wall Street Journal, our sister paper, noted at the weekend, “used to be worried about the consequences of taking US citizens (and not just US citizens) as hostages, but their fear has lessened along with American will and power”. Whoever wins the US election must end the perception of weakness in Washington.