Evan Gershkovich moved to Russia to chase his journalism dream. He believed it was important to capture life on the ground, to help Americans understand Russian culture and politics as intimately as he did. Evan was detained simply for doing his job.
Evan Gershkovich is photographed by the author while visiting her in Riga, Latvia, in 2019. The charges he faces come with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. He is now 31 years old. | Linda KinstlerLinda Kinstler is the deputy editor of The Dial and a contributing writer at Jewish Currents and 1843 Magazine. She is the author of Come to This Court and Cry and recently won a 2023 Whiting Award for nonfiction.
This week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both asserted that Evan has been wrongfully detained by the Russian government. In a statement released on Thursday, Menendez referred to the “trumped up” charges on which Evan is held and urged the Russian government to give Evan access to U.S. consular officials. The denial of access is a blatant violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
The charges that Evan faces come with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. He is now 31 years old. My mind does the math, but I refuse to write the grim possibilities down, to speak them into existence. I have to believe that we will get him home soon, but I also am all too aware — as is Evan, I’m sure — that the prognosis is not good. If, before the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, it may have been possible to try to reason with the Russian government, that is no longer the case.
We first met in college, where we traveled in the same circle of friends but were not, at first, that close. I distinctly remember bumping into Evan on the quad one day and hearing him speaking in Russian on the phone to one of his parents. After that, we bonded about being fellow children of Soviet emigrés in the U.S. — members of a subculture that was not, back then, terribly common at our small liberal arts college in coastal Maine.
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