Washington D.C. – The Atlantic Council, July 25, 2024
In video taken at his trial in Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich looked older, gaunter, and grimmer than he did before his arrest last year. His head was shaved, and his eyes were flat and unsmiling. The change in his affect was hardly surprising: He had endured a year of questioning by Russia’s internal security agency, the FSB, and was facing almost two decades in prison.
Gershkovich’s case makes visible to Americans what those following human rights in Russia have already clocked: Russian prosecutions of political prisoners have become particularly brutal in the past couple of years, as the FSB has been reviving Soviet tactics of times gone by.
