Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter sentenced to 16 years in Russia on disputed espionage charges, was released Thursday in a major multinational prisoner swap after spending more than a year behind bars. Originally from Russia, the journalist returned in 2017 to the country of his parents, Soviet Jews who fled the USSR in the late 1970s, to report on anything from environmental disasters to the repression of the opposition during the Covid pandemic.
Evan Gershkovich, a US Wall Street Journal reporter who was serving a 16-year sentence in Russia for espionage, was among the 26 prisoners released Thursday in Ankara as part of one of the biggest multinational prisoner swaps since the Cold War, according to the Turkish presidency.
