The Wall Street Journal correspondent, now 34, was sentenced to 16 years on espionage charges but freed in 2024 as part of a high-profile prisoner swap. He and his employer have always maintained the charges were false.
On the day of his arrest, Gershkovich was in Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km east of Moscow, meeting someone he believed was a source for a story. They were sitting in a half-empty dining hall when 'a group of about half-dozen masked men marched in and said 'I think we booked that table' — an odd phrase, Gershkovich said, that 'freezes you in place'.
The two men stood up and Gershkovich was told he was under arrest by the FSB, Russia's domestic security service. 'It's at that moment that you realise it's something really serious … When it's the FSB, you know it's been planned,' he said. He saw the man he had been meeting disappear into the crowd.
Not long after his arrest, Gershkovich said he realised that the fact he was not being interrogated or tortured — common tactics used by Russia's security service on real spies — likely meant he was being treated more like a commodity. 'I have this odd moment — a sense of relief flooding over me,' he said. 'I realised they're not treating me like a real spy. They've set me up and fabricated this case so that I can be a valuable hostage, a pawn in a greater game. That means it will take a while, but I won't be here for 12-20 years.'
That realisation helped him stay 'stable and disciplined in prison' and gave him a way of predicting what might happen next. He assumed his case 'would be really loud, that it would cause a global uproar' — and he was right. Media organisations worldwide reported on the case, his face appeared on a billboard in Times Square, and then-US President Joe Biden said he had 'no higher priority' than bringing Gershkovich home.
Gershkovich had been living in Russia since 2017 and was the Wall Street Journal's foreign correspondent in Moscow at the time of his arrest. He is now based in Berlin.