Evan Gershkovich sentenced to 16 years in Russian penal colony on charges of espionage

(LONDON) — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to16 years in a Russian penal colony on charges of espionageafter a guilty verdict was announced in the American journalist’s trial on Friday.

The State Prosecutors Office in Russia were looking for a sentence of 18 years but was given 16 instead.

The trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich moved to closing arguments early Friday morning after only two days of hearings in a case his newspaper and the United States have denounced as a sham.

Gershkovich has already been in detention for 15 months.

The exceptional speed of the trial has prompted speculation that Russia may be hurrying to convict Gershkovich in order to conduct a prison exchange that may have been agreed. In the past, Russia has preferred to only trade people once they have been convicted. However, the State Department on Thursday said it doesn’t have any assessment of why the trial was moved up so quickly.

Gershkovich, a 32-year-old American, has spent more than a year in Russia detention since he was arrested on espionage charges that the Wall Street Journal and the United States say are fabricated. Gershkovich’s trial began in June with a one-day hearing behind closed doors in the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, a city about 900 miles from Moscow.

After just a second day of hearings on Thursday, the court announced it had already completed considering all the evidence in the case and that closing arguments would now be heard on Friday.

After that, Gershkovich will be asked for his “final statement” and the court will consider its verdict, a spokesman for the court said, without giving a time frame for when those might happen.

The process is moving exceptionally fast for an espionage trial, which normally take months or even years. The second hearing was also moved up abruptly by a month, after originally being scheduled for mid-August.

If convicted Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison.

Gershkovich was arrested by Russia’s FSB intelligence agency while on a reporting trip in Yekaterinburg in March last year. The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. and dozens of international media organisations have vehemently denied the charges against him.

The U.S. has accused Russia of seizing Gershkovich and a number of other Americans as hostages using sham charges with the goal of exploiting them as a political bargaining chips. In recent years Russia has arrested several U.S. citizens including WNBA star Brittney Griner and later traded them for Russians imprisoned in western countries on serious charges.

Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have publicly signalled Russia wants to trade Gershkovich. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier this week again confirmed negotiations for an exchange have continued with the Biden administration.

“The intelligence services of the two countries, by agreement between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden back in June 2021, have been in contact to see if someone can be exchanged for someone else,” he said.

Gershkovich’s trial is being held in secret and Russian authorities have never presented any evidence publicly to support the charges against him. Russian prosecutors have charged him with gathering secrets on the “production and repair of military equipment” for the CIA, a claim his newspaper has denied as a “transparent lies,” saying Gershkovich was doing his job as a reporter.

“Evan’s wrongful detention has been an outrage since his unjust arrest 477 days ago, and it must end now,” the Journal said in a statement. “Even as Russia orchestrates its shameful sham trial, we continue to do everything we can to push for Evan’s immediate release and to state unequivocally: Evan was doing his job as a journalist, and journalism is not a crime. Bring him home now.”

Thursday’s hearing lasted for more than five hours, with a few short breaks, according to reporters sitting outside the courtroom. A local news outlet It’s My City reported that only one witness appeared in court Thursday, Vyacheslav Vegner, a lawmaker from Putin’s ruling United Russia party in Sverdlovsk’s regional parliament, who has previously said he gave an interview to Gershkovich before his arrest.

Vegner told the local website 66.ru that Gershkovich at the time had asked him about public support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, the activities of the Wagner mercenary group and how the Sverdlovsk region’s industrial enterprises were being repurposed.

Vegner on Thursday told Interfax that he had been questioned in court by the prosecution and defense for about a half-hour.

The Biden administration has said it is negotiating with Russia to try to free Gershkovich and another American, former Marine Paul Whelan, who has spent more than five years imprisoned by Russia on espionage charges the U.S. also says are fabricated. Russia freed Brittney Griner in exchange for the arms trafficker Viktor Bout, and another former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed was traded for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot convicted in the U.S. on drug smuggling charges.

Another American journalist, Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has also spent 9 months in detention in Russia on charges relating to her coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Roger Carstens, the U.S. State Department’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, this week said that both Gershkovich and Whelan would make it back to U.S. soil one day, but he couldn’t say when.

“The U.S. government is going to bring both of them home,” he said, speaking at the annual Aspen Security Forum. “And when we go into negotiation with the Russians, we are intent on something that brings both people home.”

ABC News’ Joe Simonetti and Mike Levine contributed to this report.