Global Courant 2023-05-02 16:07:23
Locked in a small cell with only an hour a day to walk in a narrow courtyard, he is almost completely cut off from the world.
But Evan Gershkovich, the first American journalist to be detained in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War, can receive mail – so colleagues and friends have a letter writing campaign to cheer up the correspondent of the Wall Street Journal.
Held in a notorious Moscow prison where colleagues say he shares a cell with another inmate, Gershkovich, 31, is allowed to receive the letters, but only if they are in Russian so censors can read them, and are sent from the interior. sent.
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Polina Ivanova, who also worked in Russia for the Financial timesis one of the organizers of the campaign, in which a group of volunteers in Russia takes the letters, stuffs the envelopes, takes them to the post offices and sends them to Lefortovo prison.
“One of the best ways to support him is to make sure he knows he’s the center of everyone’s attention around the world right now,” she told NBC News last week. “In the first reply he sent us to his group of friends, he talked about how important these letters are to him.”
In a statement released Friday through his Russian legal team, Gershkovich said he was “humbled and deeply moved” by all the letters he had received.
Gershkovich was on assignment for The Wall Street Journal when he was arrested last month in Yekaterinburg by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and was being held on espionage charges. He will remain in pre-trial detention until at least May 29.
The State Department has classed him as wrongfully detained — an assessment that his fellow reporter Matthew Luxmoore and his boss, Gordon Fairclough, agreed with.
Russia may be willing to discuss a possible prisoner exchange involving Gershkovich after a court rules, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said this month.
“He was a journalist doing his job, and journalism shouldn’t be a crime,” said Fairclough.
