(NewsNation) — His head is shaved, but Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has not been broken by his more than one year in Russian custody on charges of being a U.S. spy, according to his boss.
“We’ve just been really inspired and moved that he has done so well over the last 15 months,” Paul Beckett, assistant editor of The Wall Street Journal, told NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
The closed-door espionage trial began Wednesday in Yekaterinburg, the city nearly 1,000 miles east of Moscow where Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023. But according to Beckett, it’s not much of a trial.
“It’s really a hearing where a judge will endorse the accusations, and he will be convicted,” he said.
Journalists and two U.S. consular officials were allowed in the courtroom for a short time before the trial got underway. Gershkovich, 32, appeared with his head shaved, wearing a black-and-blue plaid shirt. Then the court was closed. The session lasted about two hours, with the next hearing scheduled for Aug. 13.
“We’re entering a difficult phase now,” said Beckett. “We feel that, by September, when the presidential election here is really in full swing, time will start running out for a deal to take him off this path. So we are just urging the U.S. government to do everything it can in the next few weeks to bring him home.”
Many U.S. reporters have left Moscow since Gershkovich was arrested, “so the amount of information — good information — you’re getting out of Russia has declined drastically in the last couple of years. It is a drastically worse situation in Russia for reporting and the media in general, including the foreign press, than it was even a couple of years ago,” said Beckett.
Beckett says he’s been told of ongoing conversations between Washington and Moscow about freeing Gershkovich and other Americans being held in Russia.
“We would like to see them finish the job,” said Beckett. “Get Evan, and ideally Paul Whelan and other U.S. citizens, home from Russia and figure out what it is that Russia wants in order to make that trade.
“The question going forward is going to be how can the U.S. and its allies stop Russia from doing this again and again.”