Russia convicts writer Masha Gessen; reporter Gershkovich seeks faster trial

Gershkovich, 32, has pleaded not guilty.

On Monday, a Russian court sentenced Masha Gessen, a Russian-born American author and opinion writer for the New York Times, in absentia to eight years in prison for allegedly broadcasting fake news about the military during a 2022 interview in which they discussed Russian killings of civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha and elsewhere.

“Criminal prosecution is an attempt to punish me for the conscientious and consistent fulfillment of my professional duties,” Gessen, who is based in the United States, wrote Monday in a statement posted on Facebook. Gessen added that the prosecution and Russia’s move to place them on a wanted list was “an attempt to intimidate me and prevent me from carrying out my professional activities.”

Gessen won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2017 for “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.”

Gershkovich faces a prison sentence of up to 20 years if he is convicted in the closed trial in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Western officials have said that there have been discussions about a potential prisoner swap, but Russia has said this would only be possible after the conclusion of the judicial process. More than 99.5 percent of Russian prosecutions result in convictions.

In 2020, the acquittal rate in Russia was 0.34 percent. The media and the public are barred from attending Gershkovich’s trial as is customary in Russian espionage and treason cases.

When Gershkovich’s trial commenced on June 26, Wall Street Journal editor in chief Emma Tucker described the charges as bogus, saying they would “inevitably lead to a bogus conviction for an innocent man.”

After Gershkovich’s arrest last year, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that he had been “caught red-handed,” raising questions about the objectivity of the trial in Russia’s highly politicized justice system, which has been used to jail independent Russian journalists, activists and opposition leaders and to punish anyone who posts information at odds with Kremlin propaganda on the war.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow said last month that the case against Gershkovich was “not about evidence, procedural norms, or the rule of law. It is about the Kremlin using American citizens to achieve its political objectives.”

Russian prosecutors allege that the journalist was operating on the orders of the CIA by gathering classified information about Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned machine-building factory in Nizhniy Tagil about 87 miles southeast of Yekaterinburg that manufactures tanks for the war on Ukraine.

Putin has spoken of back-channel negotiations with the United States on a prisoner exchange involving Gershkovich — as happened with basketball star Brittney Griner, who was convicted in Moscow of drug smuggling in August 2022 and freed in a prisoner exchange that December.

Another American jailed for spying, former U.S. marine Paul Whelan, has spent more than 5½ years behind bars in Russia. Whelan was passed over in two previous prisoner exchange deals with Russia — in the Griner case, and in April 2022, when another former marine, Trevor Reed, convicted of assaulting a police officer, was freed in exchange for Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was imprisoned in the United States after being convicted of drug smuggling.

When the trial opened last month, Peskov said that the charges against Gershkovich resonated in the United States, “but it is not so resonant in our country.”

Russia has also arrested a Russian American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague, and charged her with failing to register as a foreign agent and spreading fake news about the war. Kurmasheva and RFE/RL reject the charges as false.