Gershkovich says he realized Russia staged his arrest as hostage ploy

WSJ reporter tells BBC he predicted prisoner swap three weeks before release

Gershkovich described the moment of his 2023 arrest in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He was in Yekaterinburg — roughly 1,600 kilometres east of Moscow — to meet a source for a story when “a group of about half-dozen masked men marched in and said ‘I think we booked that table.’” The two men at his table 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. The man Gershkovich had come to meet disappeared into the crowd, he told the BBC.

Gershkovich had been based in Russia since 2017 and was the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow correspondent at the time of his detention. He and the newspaper have consistently maintained that the espionage charges were fabricated. He is now based in Berlin.

Speaking from Berlin, Gershkovich told the BBC that not long after his arrest he reached an unsettling conclusion. Not being interrogated or tortured — tactics he said the FSB typically uses on those it considers genuine spies — suggested to him that he was being held as a commodity rather than treated as an enemy of the state. “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,” he said, and gave him a unique way of predicting what might happen next — one guess was a prisoner swap.

Gershkovich was held in Moscow’s Lefortovo jail, a facility that has housed political prisoners and dissidents for decades and where, during Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, “torture and execution were commonplace,” according to the BBC. He described the conditions as isolating but tolerable: “I was allowed to sleep, the food was fine.” Photographs of him smiling during his Moscow court appearances — broadcast around the world — were deliberate, he said, a way of projecting defiance in what he called “a game of theatre.”

He was explicit that his experience was not representative of how Russian detention typically unfolds. “Some people… get tortured. They get broken as human beings, deprived of food, of hot water for showers, told that they’re never going to see their families again. I was treated completely differently,” Gershkovich said. He drew a direct comparison to Viktoriia Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian captivity in 2024 at age 27. Months after her death, when her body was returned, it reportedly showed signs of torture and her organs had been removed, the BBC reported.

Gershkovich said he had predicted his release through a prisoner swap roughly three weeks before it happened — an “excruciating” period, he said, because “every day is painfully long.” The swap, on 1 August 2024, was a moment of “pure joy,” he said — but one that faded quickly. “The joy fades, the adrenaline subsides, and you’re faced with the reality of having to return to normal life again,” Gershkovich said. He told the BBC the period that followed was difficult and overwhelming: he was not sleeping, suffered panic attacks in large crowds, and had a short temper because he was trying to hold in his emotions. He sought therapy with specialists in post-traumatic stress disorder and said writing a book about his detention also helped.

Gershkovich said he believed Vadim Krasikov — an assassin serving a life sentence in Germany — was the asset Moscow wanted in exchange. “They got away with it in the sense that there were no sanctions imposed. And so they played it really smart, if you think about it cynically,” he told the BBC. The attention that followed had matched what he expected when he was first detained. “I assumed that it would be really loud, that it would cause a global uproar. I mean, it’s a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal,” he said. Media outlets worldwide reported on his 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’s ties to Russia are personal as well as professional: his parents moved to the United States from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he grew up in a Russian-speaking household with a Russian name, and he moved to Russia at age 25, making friends there and maintaining a Russian girlfriend. Asked whether he would return, he was measured. “I would hope to get back one day, but I guess we’ll have to see what comes after Putin. And it’s not completely clear that the next government will be any better,” he said.