About a week before American journalist Evan Gershkovich is set to stand trial in Russia on espionage charges he denies, Russia said Wednesday it had presented its ideas for a prisoner swap to the United States and was waiting for a reply.
“The ball is in the court of the United States. We are waiting for them to respond to the ideas that were presented to them,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russian news agency TASS in an interview.
“They are well known to the relevant parts of the U.S. administration. I understand that, perhaps, something in these ideas does not suit the Americans. That’s their problem,” Ryabkov added.
“We consider our approaches to be fully justified, sensible, balanced. We expect that this is how they will view them,” he said.
Gershkovich, a Russian correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, has been jailed since March 2023 on spying accusations that he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny. The U.S. State Department has also declared the 32-year-old wrongfully detained.
Gershkovich’s closed-door trial is set to begin on June 26 in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, where he was arrested more than a year ago. Press freedom experts have said the trial will almost certainly be a sham.
Yekaterinburg is about 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow.
If convicted, Gershkovich faces up to 20 years behind bars. Russian authorities, however, have said a trial is required before a prisoner swap can take place.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously indicated that Moscow would be willing to exchange Gershkovich for a Russian man currently jailed in Germany for killing a Chechen dissident.
Gershkovich is one of two American journalists currently jailed in Russia.
Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian national who works at VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, has been jailed since October 2023 on charges of failing to self-register as a “foreign agent” and spreading what Moscow views as false information about the Russian military.
Kurmasheva and her employer reject the charges against her, which carry a combined sentence of up to 15 years in prison. The U.S. government has also called for her immediate release.
Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse.
