The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of gathering secret information on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.

The reporter, his employer and the US government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on US orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich’s release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to stability, proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the US is taking energetic steps to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases aren’t decided via mass media but through a discreet, calm and professional approach.

And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity, he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.

Gershkovich was the first US journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for US-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with dual US-Russian citizenship, has been jailed since October awaiting trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

US Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him fiction and said that Russia is using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.

Separately, US soldier Gordon Black is on trial in Vladivostok on charges of theft and threatening murder in a dispute with a Russian woman. Black, who was stationed in South Korea but visiting the Pacific Coast city, on Monday told a court that he denied the allegation of threatening murder but partially admitted to theft, according to the state news agency RIA-Novosti.

First Published: Jun 17 2024 | 11:28 AM IST