Why Russia has kept a Wall Street Journal reporter in jail for a year — and counting

Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia on charges of spying, just had three months added to his jail time — and he hasn’t even gone to trial yet.

It’s been a year since Gershkovich, who had covered the country for five years at that point, was arrested by Russian security forces. He was on assignment in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains nearly 900 miles east of the Journal’s Moscow bureau. And because of Russia’s opaque and autocratic justice system, the trial — when it comes — will likely be conducted in secret. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in a Russian penal colony.

The US government says he is “wrongfully detained” — a designation the US applies to citizens detained overseas on what it considers to be unfounded charges and whose release it is actively working to secure.

While foreign reporters have been kicked out of the country since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and many Russian reporters have been detained, forced to flee the country, or killed while President Vladimir Putin has been in power, Gershkovich’s case is somewhat unusual in that he’s an American reporter accused of espionage. He’s the first foreign reporter detained on espionage charges since the Cold War, when US News & World Report’s Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in 1986.