Did Evan Gershkovich Spy on Russia?
Evan Gershkovich was a jewish journalist who officially worked for the ‘Wall Street Journal’ as a foreign correspondent in Russia (1) who was arrested for and subsequently convicted of espionage by Russia in July 2024 (2) being sentenced to eighteen years in prison and then returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange in August 2024. (3)
Predictably the jewish-dominated mainstream media in the West issued categorical denials and screamed that it was all a dastardly plot by Russian President Vladimir Putin to ‘gain leverage’ over the West (4) and while this was a potential motive: it wasn’t necessarily either true or the whole story.
Firstly, we know that Gershkovich first arrived in Russia in 2017 and worked for the ‘Moscow Times’, ‘Agence France-Presse’ and the ‘New York Times’ before joining the ‘Wall Street Journal’ in 2022. (5)
He wasn’t arrested for circa six years later in 2023 which is noteworthy because either he was indeed a journalist who had been innocently operating in Russia and was simply later arrested for ‘leverage’ or a misunderstanding or it took Russia six years to suspect/gather enough evidence that Gershkovich wasn’t quite what he seemed.
Secondly, Gershkovich was arrested in quite specific circumstances as Robert Greenall and Matt Murphy write in their article for the BBC:
‘The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter was first arrested last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow, by security services.’ (6)
What Greenall and Murphy all but leave out is the vital context hinted at by the press release from the Russian FSB (the Federal Security Service) which states that:
‘It was established that E. Gershkovich, acting on instructions from the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex. While attempting to obtain classified information, the foreigner was detained in Yekaterinburg.’ (7)
But what specifically are the FSB talking about?
Well, the specifics are buried at the bottom of Greenall and Murphy’s article when they dismissively state that:
‘In a charging indictment, prosecutors accused Gershkovich, 32, of acting “under instructions from the CIA" to collect "secret information" about a factory that produces tanks in the Sverdlovsk region.’ (8)
Indeed, Tara Law’s article for ‘Time’ gives more specific detail on this:
‘The independent news organization Meduza reported that Gershkovich had also visited Nizhny Tagil, where a defense facility is based. His last byline for the Journal before his arrest was, “Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come Undone.” Russia has been keen to maintain popular support for the conflict in Russia, so Gershkovich’s recent report may have been particularly disturbing to the Kremlin.’ (9)
The defence facility that ‘produces tanks’ in the Russian city of Nizhny Tagil is Uralvagonzavod and is Russia’s largest and main manufacturing facility of its vital armoured forces and we know that Gershkovich was researching the wartime Russian economy, which makes his visit to Uralvagonzavod both understandable and odd at the same time, because while it is part of the Russian wartime economy: it is also somewhat apart from that economy as it is a defence contractor not say a car factory or an agricultural combine.
So why would Gershkovich visit Uralvagonzavod in particular as a journalist?
Possibly to report on Russian tank production – since Russia has lost a significant number of tanks and armoured vehicles in the ongoing war in Ukraine and has seriously struggled to maintain sufficient production capacity to replace them – but it would be a risky proposition indeed for a journalist to do so precisely because what Gershkovich was doing was visiting a key Russian defence installation during war time and that carries a significant risk of this action being seen/interpreted as an act of espionage even if Gershkovich was not actually a spy.
The other reason would be because Gershkovich was actually a spy acting under the cover of his journalistic activities which has long been a common espionage practice. (10)
This then puts an entirely different spin on the events in that at best Gershkovich is guilty of being an absolute idiot and knowingly putting himself in an extremely compromising position with Russian authorities by visiting a key defence installation during war time and then presumably trying to write about it in the ‘Wall Street Journal’.
While at worst Gershkovich was indeed a spy associated with the CIA (or possibly the Mossad given that he is very explicitly jewish) operating under the cover of being a journalist and visited Uralvagonzavod to gather information on the facility and its workings for the CIA/Mossad.
This then makes sense of Gershkovich’s sudden arrest in Yekaterinburg on his way back from visiting Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil by the FSB and the fact that they claim – probably correctly – that he had compromising documents/proofs of espionage on him from the facility. The FSB were acting entirely rationally in this instance and it would difficult to not believe that the FBI would do the same in the same situation in the United States if a Russian journalist visited say a DARPA facility and was going to write about it in ‘Russia Today’.
Whether Gershkovich was/is an undercover spy for the CIA or the Mossad we’ll likely never know, but one thing we can say with certainly: it wasn’t Russia or the FSB that were behaving irrationally; it was Gershkovich unless Gershkovich was actually a spy in which case his actions would be entirely logical and rational as would the massive hullabaloo in the West to try and get him back.
References
(1) https://time.com/6267183/evan-gershkovich-arrested-wsj-russia-espionage/
(2) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg64npg33r3o
(3) https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ck7gwe808yet
(4) https://time.com/6267183/evan-gershkovich-arrested-wsj-russia-espionage/
(5) Ibid.
(6) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg64npg33r3o
(7) http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/press/message/single.htm%21id%3D10439682%40fsbMessage.html
(8) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg64npg33r3o
(9) https://time.com/6267183/evan-gershkovich-arrested-wsj-russia-espionage/
(10) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/29/russian-spy-brazilian-student-washington/