Evan Gershkovich: Reporter, football fan, family man
- Published
Evan Gershkovich, the first American journalist jailed in Russia since the Cold War, has been released after more than 16 months in custody.
The Wall Street Journal reporter was detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service in March 2023 while on a reporting assignment in Yekaterinburg, a city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.
Sentenced last month to 16 years in prison after being found guilty of espionage by a Russian court, he is now a part of the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
Mr Gershkovich, his family, his employer and the US government have always maintained his innocence.
Now 32 years old, the US citizen was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on 26 October 1991.
He is the second child of Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich, Jewish immigrants who fled the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.
Mr Gershkovich and his older sister, Danielle, grew up speaking Russian at home.
A long-time football fan, he captained the team at his local high school and was known to be a dedicated fan of Arsenal.
His flatmates from when he lived in Brooklyn, New York, have recalled since his incarceration that he would wake them up early in the morning on weekends to watch televised Arsenal matches - even if they had been out late the night before.
One friend, Jeremy Berke, recently described him to BBC Radio 4 as "the most extroverted person that I've ever met in my whole life".
Arsenal fans have rallied behind the football club's long-time fan
In 2014, Mr Gershkovich graduated with degrees in English and philosophy from Bowdoin College, a prominent liberal arts college in Maine - a state in America's north-east.
The budding young journalist first honed his reporting skills in college, writing for The Bowdoin Orient student newspaper as well as a separate student-run publication, The Bowdoin Review.
He also disc-jockeyed at WBOR, the campus radio station.
His first professional foray into journalism came in 2016, when he moved to New York and worked as a news assistant for The New York Times.
He began to show his reporting chops and practise his Russian when he moved to Moscow and took a reporting job at The Moscow Times in 2017.
The independent outlet - now blocked in Russia and designated a "foreign agent" by its government - is known for its hardnosed reporting, which often led to scoops that the rest of the Western press corps scrambled to match.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr Gershkovich interviewed medical students forced to treat infected patients and statisticians who were concerned the state was fudging Russia's case numbers.
Many of his fellow reporters in Russia quickly became his friends, including the BBC's Will Vernon and James Beardsworth.
Everyone was "impressed by his drive, his knowledge of Russia's language and culture, his ease at making contacts, and his willingness to go the extra mile", the New Yorker's Joshua Yaffa writes.
After a brief stint at the Agence France-Presse (AFP) wire service, he joined the Wall Street Journal in January 2022.
A month later, Russia invaded Ukraine and a package of war-time censorship laws forced Mr Gershkovich and other reporters to flee the country, unsure of how to continue their work.
The US citizen would arrange with the Journal to be based in London but go into Russia on assignment for two or three weeks at a time before returning to the UK.
He travelled around the massive country with a valid Russian visa and proper journalistic accreditation, but was reportedly often followed during his visits.
His last Journal article, in March 2023, covered how the strain of a war entering its second year and the bite of Western sanctions had harmed the Russian economy.
His ordeal began roughly two months later during his reporting trip to Yekaterinburg, a major Russian industrial hub.
Mr Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 months in prison
Russian authorities say the American was "caught red-handed" with "classified information" while reporting in the city.
The Journal's editor-in-chief told the BBC earlier this year that is "complete, total and utter nonsense".
Western politicians roundly condemned Russia when it found the journalist guilty of espionage last month and sentenced him to 16 years in prison.
US President Joe Biden said Mr Gershkovich had "committed no crime" and was "targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American".
"Evan has endured his ordeal with remarkable strength," Mr Biden added.
Mr Gershkovich has sent and received letters from friends, family and supporters throughout his detention in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, where Russia has held high-profile political prisoners and dissidents since Tsarist times.
Danielle Gershkovich has spoken of their correspondence as light and reassuring.
"We have a lot of sibling banter back and forth, a lot of teasing with love," she told the BBC earlier this year.
Her brother has even managed to surprise the family while locked away.
"On International Women's Day, he arranged for the women in his life to receive bouquets," she said.
"We want him to focus on himself and there he was taking care of us."