American journalist Evan Gershkovich who has been held in Moscow prison for more than a year is to go on trial over espionage charges

American journalist Evan Gershkovich will stand trial in Russia on espionage charges, it was announced yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal reporter, who has been held in a Moscow prison for more than a year, is accused of “collecting classified information” from a Russian tank factory on behalf of the CIA.

Gershkovich, 32, will stand trial in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, where he was being held.

According to Russia’s attorney general, his case was filed at the Sverdlovsky Regional Court, about 800 miles east of Moscow.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, left, stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction in Moscow

Officials did not provide any evidence to support the allegations and there was no word on when the trial would begin.

The White House has tried to negotiate his release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would only consider a prisoner swap after a verdict in his trial.

Gershkovich was arrested during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and charged with spying for the United States.

The reporter, his employer and the US government denied the allegations, and Washington labeled him as wrongfully detained.

“Russia’s latest move toward a show trial, while expected, is deeply disappointing and yet no less outrageous,” said a statement from Almar Latour, CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Journal, and Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

They added that the accusations against Gershkovich were “false and baseless.”

“The Russian regime’s smearing of Evan is abhorrent, disgusting and based on calculated and transparent lies. Journalism is not a crime. Evan’s case is an attack on the free press,” the statement said.

“We had hoped to avoid this moment and now expect the U.S. government to redouble its efforts to secure Evan’s release.”

Uralvagonzavod, a state-owned tank and rail car factory in Nizhny Tagil, about 90 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg, became known as a backer for President Vladimir Putin.

Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia last March for ‘espionage’, will be tried in a court in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg

The reporter, his employer and the US government denied the allegations, and Washington labeled him as wrongfully detained

The factory foreman appeared on Putin’s annual telephone program in December 2011 and denounced the mass protests taking place in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability.”

A week later, Putin appointed the factory foreman as his envoy to the region.

Putin has said he believed a deal could be reached to release Gershkovich, indicating he would be open to trading him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany, which turned out to be Vadim Krasikov.

He was serving a life sentence for the 2019 murder of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent in Berlin.

When Putin was asked about Gershkovich last week, he said the US was “taking energetic steps” to secure his release.

He told international news agencies in St. Petersburg that such releases were achieved through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

He was the first American journalist to be taken into custody for espionage since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War.

Gershkovich, the son of Soviet émigrés who settled in New Jersey, was fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times before joining the Journal in 2022.

Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a notorious Tsarist-era prison used during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship.

US Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, called the charges against him “fiction.”