‘He’s an idiot.’ Evan Gershkovich says Putin spent more than an hour trying to convince a world leader that the WSJ reporter really was a spy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was convinced that American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was convicted in Russia on charges of spying under the guise of reporting, really was a spy. Gershkovich recounted Putin’s belief in an excerpt from his memoir published in The Wall Street Journal.
In another meeting after my release, a world leader who had become involved in the swap told me that Putin had once spent over an hour lecturing him on the fact that I was indeed an intelligence operative, that I had been caught red-handed. When the person asked Putin if he hadn’t considered whether it was much too easy to catch me red-handed—because a trained agent might have figured out that there was a sting operation closing in on him, for example—Putin didn’t budge.
“He’s an idiot,” Putin said, banging his fist on the table. “He was much too obvious.”
American television host Tucker Carlson also confirmed to Gershkovich that Putin believed he was a spy. Carlson had raised Gershkovich’s case with Putin during an interview in Moscow that aired in February 2024. Carlson asked about the prospects for Gershkovich’s release. Gershkovich was then being held in pretrial detention.
After his release, Gershkovich met Carlson, who told him about an informal conversation with Putin. As Putin showed Carlson around the Kremlin, Carlson brought up Gershkovich again: “Putin told Carlson he was confused about something: Why would the U.S. work so hard to free a basketball player but not a spy?”
Gershkovich believes the FSB sought “the best way of packaging the tale” to persuade Putin that he was a spy. He believes the agency arranged his first meeting with Pavel Sergienya, a provocateur and an activist with the Ural trade union Solidarity, for that purpose. “The FSB could go to Putin and sell him on a story that would lead him to believe I was in fact a spy and give the green light for my arrest at the second meeting. Putin, it seems to me, fully bought into this narrative,” Gershkovich writes.
Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, was detained in Yekaterinburg in March 2023. On July 19, 2024, he was sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony on espionage charges after being accused of collecting classified information about Uralvagonzavod’s operations. He was released in a major prisoner exchange between Russia and Western countries on August 1, 2024.
After his release, Gershkovich wrote a memoir about his imprisonment in Russia titled “This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story.” Penguin Random House will publish the book in late September.
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Who is this?
After Gershkovich’s release, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona found that an activist with the Ural trade union “Solidarity,” Pavel Sergienya, was involved in his case. He was also implicated in a provocation against Nizhny Tagil opposition figure Andrei Fogel. Sergiyenya’s exact role in Gershkovich’s case was unclear at the time, but in the published excerpt, Gershkovich recounts meeting with Sergiyenya at the moment of his detention, when Sergiyenya brought documents containing data on the Russian defense industry to the meeting.
Who’s this about?
This is a reference to American basketball player Brittney Griner, who was detained in February 2022 at Sheremetyevo Airport over vape cartridges containing hashish oil. She was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony and later exchanged for “arms dealer” Viktor Bout, who was serving a sentence in an American prison.
Which exchange?
On August 1, 2024, Russia carried out a large-scale prisoner exchange with Western countries, releasing 16 people from Russian penal colonies, including Gershkovich. The exchange also included politicians Ilya Yashin and Andrei Pivovarov, former coordinators of Navalny’s campaign offices who were convicted on charges of involvement in an “extremist community,” along with several other people.