US-Russian journalist sentenced to 6.5 years in secret trial: NPR

After a secret trial, a court convicted Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced her to six and a half years in prison, court records and officials said Monday.

Kurmasheva’s family, her employer and the U.S. government have rejected the charges against her and called for her release.

The court in Kazan, the capital of the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan, sentenced Evan Gershkovich on Friday. The same day, a court in Yekaterinburg, Russia, sentenced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison for espionage. The United States said the case was politically motivated.

After a two-day trial, Kurmasheva, 47, was found guilty of “spreading false information about the military,” according to the Tatarstan Supreme Court website. Court spokeswoman Natalya Loseva confirmed Kurmasheva’s conviction and disclosed the verdict to The Associated Press by phone in the case, which is classified as confidential.

Kurmasheva was ordered to serve his sentence in a medium-security prison, Loseva said.

“My daughters and I know Arsu did nothing wrong. The whole world knows it. We need her to come home,” Kurmasheva’s husband, Pavel Butorin, said in a post on X on Monday.

He said last year that the accusations stemmed from a book published in 2022 by the Tatar-Bashkir News Agency called “Rejection of War” – “a collection of short stories about Russians who do not want their country to go to war with Ukraine.” Butorin has said the book does not contain any “false information.”

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Kurmasheva “has been targeted by Russian authorities for her commitment to truth-telling and principled reporting.”

Miller added: “We continue to make it clear that she should be released.”

Asked about the case, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty President and CEO Stephen Capps condemned Kurmasheva’s trial and conviction as “a travesty of justice.” “The only just outcome is for Arsu to be immediately released from prison by her Russian captors,” he said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“It has been a long time since this American citizen, our dear colleague, has been reunited with her loving family,” Capps said.

Kurmasheva, who holds American and Russian citizenship and lives in Prague with her husband and two daughters, was detained in October 2023 and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information on the Russian military.

She was also later charged with spreading “false information” about the Russian military, a bill that effectively criminalizes any public speech about the war in Ukraine that deviates from the Kremlin’s line. The bill was passed in March 2022, just days after the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine, and has since been used to target Kremlin critics at home and abroad, implicating dozens in criminal cases and sent dozens to prison.

Kurmasheva was stopped at Kazan International Airport in June 2023 after she had traveled to Russia the previous month to visit her elderly mother. Officials confiscated her U.S. and Russian passports and fined her for not registering her U.S. passport. She was arrested on new charges in October of that year while awaiting the return of her passport. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has repeatedly called for her release.

In 2017, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was required by Russian authorities to register as a foreign agent, but the organization has challenged Moscow’s use of the foreign agent law at the European Court of Human Rights. The organization has been fined millions of dollars by Russia.

Reporters Without Borders said Kurmasheva’s conviction “shows that the Russian judicial system is riddled with unprecedented despotism and that it does the Kremlin’s bidding.”

It called for Kurmasheva’s immediate release and said the sentence was aimed at deterring journalists from travelling to Russia and putting pressure on the United States.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was designated an unwelcome organization in Russia in February. The station’s Tatar-Bashkir service is the only major international news provider that reports in Tatar-Bashkir as a primary language in addition to Russian to audiences in the multi-ethnic, Muslim-majority Volga-Urals region.

The swift and secret trials of Kurmasheva and Gershkevich in Russia’s highly politicized judicial system have raised hopes for a possible prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington. Russia has previously hinted at a possible prisoner swap involving Gershkevich but said his case must be decided first.

Nine U.S. citizens have been detained in Russia as Russian arrests of Americans become increasingly common amid escalating tensions between the two countries over the war in Ukraine.

Gershkovich, 32, was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was collecting classified information for the U.S.

He has been in prison since his arrest, and that time will count towards his sentence. Much of that time was spent in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, a tsarist-era prison used by Joseph Stalin during the purges, when executions were carried out in the basement. He was transferred to Yekaterinburg to stand trial.

Gershkovich is the first American journalist to be arrested on espionage charges since Nicholas Danilov was arrested at the height of the Cold War in 1986. News of Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though Russia has enacted increasingly stringent free-speech laws since it sent troops to Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden said after Gershkovic’s conviction that he was “targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and because he is an American.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, accused Moscow last week of using “human beings as pawns.” She singled out Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan, 53, a corporate security executive in Michigan who was sentenced to 16 years in prison for espionage, charges he and the United States deny.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the United States is working on the cases “almost every day” for Gershkovich, Whelan and other Americans wrongfully detained in Russia and elsewhere.

Sam Green of the Center for European Policy Analysis said the conviction and sentencing of Kurmasheva and Gershkovic on the same day “suggests — but does not prove — that the Kremlin is preparing to make a deal. More likely, they are preparing to offer a negotiating table that Washington will find hard to ignore.”

In a series of posts on X, Green stressed that “the existence of a negotiating table should not be confused with the existence of a deal” and that Moscow has no intention of releasing its prisoners – but it will likely “seek the highest price for its bargaining chips and, in the process, seek additional concessions to keep the talks going”.

He said Washington “should obviously do everything in its power” to free Gershkovich, Kurmasheva, jailed opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza and other political prisoners, adding: “But what if Moscow demands what it really wants — to abandon Ukraine?”