MOSCOW — American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who has been jailed in Russia for more than a year on espionage charges, will stand trial in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said Thursday.
An indictment against the Wall Street Journal reporter has been completed and his case has been filed in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) east of Moscow, the Russian Attorney General’s office said.
Gershkovich is accused of “collecting classified information” for the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility in the Sverdlovsk region that produces and repairs military equipment, the Attorney General’s Office said in a statement, providing details of the accusations against him are revealed.
Officials have not provided any evidence to support the allegations. There was no word on when the trial would begin.
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 Washington labeled him as wrongfully detained.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed at the time that he was acting on US orders to collect state secrets, but also provided no evidence.
President Vladimir Putin has said he believed a deal could be reached to release Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to trading him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. 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 by the Associated Press last week, he said the US was “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He said such releases are “not decided through the mass media,” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”
“And that should certainly only be decided on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, referring to a possible prisoner swap.
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’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even as the country had enacted increasingly repressive freedom of speech laws after sending troops into Ukraine.
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 newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.
Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a notorious Tsarist-era prison used during Josef Stalin’s purges, when executions were carried out in the basement.
The Biden administration has tried to negotiate his release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it would only consider a prisoner swap after a ruling in his trial.
U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”
Since sending troops into Ukraine, Russian authorities have arrested several U.S. citizens and other Westerners, seemingly reinforcing that idea.