After 17 months in a Russian prison, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was freed last week in a prisoner swap between the United States and Russia.
During the time Gershkovich was imprisoned — on trumped-up charges of espionage — the Journal relentlessly pursued the story and advocated for the journalist’s release.
Last October, Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker announced assistant editor Paul Beckett would step away from his regular gig to focus on getting Gershkovich freed.
Appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Beckett said, “Very very early on, someone in the government to whom I’ll always be grateful to for this advice said there’s a time to be loud and there’s a time to be quiet, and now is the time to be loud. And so we stayed loud until we knew the time to be quiet. And that time to be quiet was Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
Correspondent Ed O’Keefe asked whether Beckett was ever concerned “that by being so public, it potentially put him at greater risk or that it put other colleagues either at the Journal or at other publications at greater risk?”
“The Russians didn't give us much of a choice,” Beckett said, “because they came out and said he is a spy. Total nonsense.”
Meanwhile, for The Washington Post, opinion writer Jason Rezaian shared some hard-earned advice for Gershkovich and the others freed in the prisoner swap — businessman and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Rezaian was imprisoned by Iran for nearly a year and a half and was freed in 2016.
“After the euphoria wears off, though, a new set of challenges will inevitably emerge. Having been cut off from society for months or years, the returning hostages will face difficulty returning to ordinary life,” Rezaian wrote.
He wrote that he found the IRS had charged him thousands of dollars for not filing taxes on time — fees that compounded. His wife’s immigration papers had expired. Bills that were set to autopay had been declined and his credit rating was shattered.
“I was sleeping less than three hours a night, repeatedly waking from nightmares that I was back in prison,” he wrote. “During the day, I was distracted and having trouble concentrating. So I neglected to sit down and address the problem.”
Rezaian urged the House of Representatives to approve a bill — the Stop Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which passed through the Senate in May — to help others like Gershkovich.
“As a free society, we owe the victims of this abuse more than our support and empathy,” he wrote. “Considerable resources were expended in the effort to negotiate their release. It is important now to invest more to return them to normal life.”
In an interview after a win at the Olympics, basketball star Brittney Griner, who was also imprisoned by Russia in 2022, said she was “head over heels” that the Americans had been freed.
“Great day. It’s a great day. It’s a great day,” she said. “… Any day that Americans come home, that’s a win. That’s a win.”
Finally, The New York Times’ Emmett Lindner interviewed Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, who, Lindner writes, “has been following the story from both a professional and a personal perspective: He met Mr. Gershkovich in Russia in 2018, and the two bonded over their shared journalistic mission.”
Troianovski wrote a piece on Thursday that reconstructed how the deal between the U.S. and Russia happened and what it means for future international agreements. Lindner spoke to him about that story and his friendship with Gershkovich.
