Join us
The Media Today

Evan and Alsu are free. Vladyslav, Ihar, and Andrey are not.

August 2, 2024 By Jon Allsop
Alsu Kurmasheva is greeted by family members after she was released by Russia. Evan Gershkovich, also released, is at right. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Two weeks ago, Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was jailed last year in Russia, was convicted on bogus charges of espionage and sentenced to sixteen years in a penal colony. This was about as dire a headline as one could imagine for a foreign correspondent, and yet, in the not-so-funhouse mirror of the Russian legal system, it offered at least a seed of hope: Gershkovich’s case appeared to have been expedited, which some observers suggested could signal a willingness to include him in a prisoner swap. In recent days, rumors of imminent news on that front grew in volume. By yesterday morning, various outlets were reporting it as fact; the Journal initially held off, before confirming Gershkovich’s freedom on its homepage, along with a photo showing him smiling. This was actually an old image of Gershkovich, from his court proceedings, but we soon got new ones: of Gershkovich posing with a US flag as he stopped over in Turkey, of Gershkovich on a plane, and, finally, of Gershkovich on US soil, bear-hugging his mother, President Biden grinning behind them.

Nor was Gershkovich alone in these photos. Paul Whelan—a former Marine who had been jailed in Russia since 2018, and who, like Gershkovich, had been declared “wrongfully detained” by the US government—was in them, too, as was another journalist: Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual US and Russian citizen who works for the US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and was jailed last year after visiting her ailing mother in the Russian city of Kazan. Jeffrey Gedmin, an RFE/RL board member who was the interim president of the organization when Kurmasheva was detained, told me yesterday that he’d heard rumors in DC of an imminent swap, but that “rumors are rumors”; when some of the initial reporting on the details of the trade omitted Kurmasheva’s name, “your heart sinks,” he said. But he needn’t have worried. Yesterday, her family appeared at the White House with Biden, who led a chorus of “Happy Birthday” for Miriam, Kurmasheva’s daughter, thirteen today. (“Remember,” Biden added, “no serious guys till you’re thirty.”) Later, they got their own reunited-on-the-tarmac moment.

This was all wonderful to see—not only for all the obvious reasons, but because, as I reported back in April, Kurmasheva’s case often felt like an afterthought compared with that of Gershkovich, even though she, too, is an American journalist. Among those working to free the pair, there was always a strong sense of camaraderie. (“We had many partners and friends in this endeavor,” Diane Zeleny, RFE/RL’s head of external affairs, told me yesterday, namechecking the Committee to Protect Journalists, the National Press Club, the Foley Foundation—and the Journal.) But on the whole, Kurmasheva got less media coverage. Biden spoke her name fewer times. Most importantly, and to the chagrin of many of her supporters, his administration never declared her wrongfully detained, as it had with Gershkovich and Whelan.

Officials consistently stressed that each case is different, and that observers shouldn’t read into the lack of designation that Kurmasheva was any less of a priority. And yesterday, she and Gershkovich were, indeed, freed at the same time. But the issue of who gets the designation and who doesn’t—and the murkiness of the process, despite legislative efforts to clear it up—remains an important story for next time, since, at least theoretically, it can unlock greater diplomatic resources on a detainee’s behalf. In April, Bill McCarren, a press freedom consultant for the National Press Club, told me that in his view, US journalists jailed overseas should get the designation presumptively. Yesterday, he told me that it’s still important to “declare it early,” since it can improve the “quality of the detention” and, if nothing else, make reporters more likely to question bogus charges more quickly—even if that doesn’t itself lead to an earlier release.

It’s also hard to draw general conclusions from the release of Gershkovich and Kurmasheva since the circumstances were unexpected: while prisoner swaps typically concern only a handful of individuals, this one involved twenty-four detainees; many headlines were quick to note that it was the biggest such exchange since the Cold War. Those freed also included Vladimir Kara-Murza, an activist and columnist who writes regularly for the Washington Post, as well as a co-chair of the famed Russian rights group Memorial and several associates of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny—who was once slated to be swapped himself, only to die in murky circumstances at a Russian prison camp in February. (Indeed, the inclusion in the deal of so many Russian activists makes one wonder whether the term prisoner “swap” is really apt in this case.) While the matter is, happily, now academic in Gershkovich’s and Kurmasheva’s cases, Gedmin noted to me yesterday that in a more typical, smaller swap situation, the “wrongfully detained” designation could have been material. “I think we all need postmortems on this,” Gedmin said. “It’ll take some time, and some study, and some care, and some deliberation.”

Indeed, the question isn’t really so academic after all—sadly, there will likely be a next time. Despite the seductive Cold War comparison, it’s never been the best way of thinking about Gershkovich’s and Kurmasheva’s cases; as I wrote after the former was arrested last year, a better analogue was that of Jason Rezaian, the Post reporter who was famously detained by Iran for diplomatic leverage in the 2010s, and who noted at the time of Gershkovich’s arrest that he should be thought of as “a hostage until proven otherwise.” In exchange for freeing people who would likely never have been jailed in a democracy, Russia yesterday got back an assortment of people who were, on charges ranging from spying to smuggling—not to mention Vadim Krasikov, an apparent Putin associate who assassinated a former Chechen militant in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019. Deviating from the jubilant tone of much of yesterday’s commentary, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols warned that “the grubby reality is that the Russians have engaged in successful hostage-taking,” and that “the Kremlin is getting what it wants.” The risks of this for journalists have already become apparent—and not only on Russian soil.

Sign up for CJR’s daily email

And in some ways, the question isn’t one of next time, but of now. A number of US citizens remain in jail in Russia. There are no journalists among them. But a number of Russian journalists are still behind bars there. When I asked Ann Cooper, a former Moscow correspondent for NPR, for her take yesterday, she noted the “great news” for those exchanged, but then said that her thoughts remained with Ivan Safronov, a journalist turned adviser to Russia’s space agency who was arrested in 2020 and condemned to twenty-two years in prison—an “unconscionably long sentence,” Cooper said. “His journalist colleagues consider his case bogus, unjust, and a terrible symbol of the corrupt justice system in Russia,” she added, “but as a Russian citizen you do not hear his name when the subject of prisoner exchanges comes up.”

Kurmasheva was not even the only RFE/RL journalist to have been jailed by Russian authorities or their allies: Vladyslav Yesypenko, a Ukrainian citizen, remains detained in Russian-occupied Crimea, while Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk are behind bars in Belarus, a close partner of Russia that appears to have participated in this week’s prisoner swap by pardoning a German citizen. (According to RFE/RL, Losik has been incommunicado since February 2023.) Back in April, Zeleny noted to me that these reporters’ cases haven’t garnered much attention since they aren’t American, even though each of them “was bravely doing their job for an American-funded organization.” Deniz Yuksel, RFE/RL’s advocacy manager, told me in an email yesterday that the broadcaster is now even more determined to bring them home, too. “In the course of the Alsu campaign, we’ve built up a lot of new relationships and expertise that we plan to leverage,” Yuksel said. “Plus, raising her profile has helped us raise theirs too.”

This echoed something that McCarren told me in April, when I put it to him that the attention to Gershkovich had dwarfed that afforded to Kurmasheva: that attention to any such case has “the potential to lift all boats.” Sometimes, one jailed journalist becoming a press-freedom cause célèbre over another can feel unfair —but it is, as McCarren suggests, infinitely preferable to no focus on jailed journalists at all. Those lobbying to free Gershkovich and Kurmasheva—at the Journal, RFE/RL, and beyond—did a stunning job of keeping their cases in the public eye. In a general sense, that sort of work must now continue. If Russian opposition activists can be freed in a prisoner deal, then so can Russian journalists. If US journalists can be freed, so can those working for a US taxpayer-funded outlet.

We must also continue to pay attention to the growing practice of diplomatic hostage-taking-for-leverage—a concerning and complicated story whose significance goes far beyond the tales of Gershkovich and Kurmasheva. Yesterday, in the hours after Gershkovich was freed, his colleagues at the Journal published an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at that world through the lens of his case. They wrote that the Journal had started investigating Russian hostage-taking even before Gershkovich was arrested—indeed, it was Gershkovich who encouraged the paper to do so. The story, he said at the time, is “totally undercovered.” 


Other notable stories:

  • For CJR, Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, shares his “notes from a fiasco”—Donald Trump’s contentious appearance, earlier this week, at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor noted that Trump succeeded just by doing the interview, gaining attention and galvanizing an audience, “albeit not necessarily the one gathered on the second floor of the Hilton,” Cobb writes. “Political figures have always engaged with the press in self-interested ways. The calculation for journalists, however, is the line at which that self-interest represents an unacceptable conflict with our own professional mandates. The forum at NABJ was combative, at points ridiculous, and, in the aftermath, just as divisive as it had been beforehand. It was, in other words, exactly what we should have expected.”
  • Earlier this week, we noted in this newsletter that a union representing staffers at Crooked Media, the liberal media outlet founded by prominent former Obama staffers, had filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, accusing it of attempted union-busting. (Crooked Media denies this.) Now Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman reports that the labor dispute forms just one part of broader tensions at the outlet. “Members of the young, idealistic staff” have clashed with “the more moderate hosts and founders,” over the union push but also the war in Gaza, Carman reports. Staffers also have “more common workplace complaints—from promotions to office romance.” 

ICYMI: The moral trade-offs NABJ made in inviting Donald Trump to the stage in Chicago

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.