A Russian court has sentenced Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded station, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison after a secret trial, court documents and officials said Monday.
The conviction in the city of Kazan came on Friday, the same day as a court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich sentenced The U.S. State Department said Gershkovich was wrongly detained by Russia, a distinction the State Department did not make in Kurmasheva’s case.
Kurmasheva, 47, editor-in-chief of RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir service, was convicted of “spreading false information” about the military, according to the website of the Supreme Court of Tatarstan. Natalia Loseva, a spokeswoman for the court, confirmed by telephone to The Associated Press that Kurmasheva had been sentenced to six and a half years in prison in a classified case, without specifying the charges against her.
Asked about the verdict Monday, RFE/RL Chairman and CEO Stephen Capus denounced Kurmasheva’s trial and conviction as “a travesty of justice.”
“The only just outcome is for Alsou to be immediately released from prison by her Russian captors,” he said in a statement. “It is past time for this American citizen, our dear colleague, to be reunited with her beloved family.”
Claire Bigg / Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty via AP
Asked about him at a regular press briefing on July 16, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller reiterated a general statement to reporters that “journalism is not a crime” and that the U.S. government had “requested his prompt release” from Russia.
Miller said he had “no new information to provide regarding a wrongful detention decision.”
The journalism advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders, whose French acronym is RSF, has launched a petition calling on the U.S. government to make a decision regarding Kurmasheva’s unjustified detention.
“His targeting was undoubtedly the result of his work as a journalist,” the group says on its campaign webpage, calling for a decision that it says “could mobilize all of the government’s resources to secure his release.”
Kurmasheva, who holds dual U.S.-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 gathering information about the Russian military. She was later also charged with spreading “false information” about the Russian military under legislation that effectively criminalizes any public expression about the war in Ukraine that deviates from the Kremlin line.
Kurmasheva was first arrested in June 2023 at Kazan International Airport after traveling to Russia the previous month to visit her elderly and ailing mother. Authorities confiscated her U.S. and Russian passports and fined her for failing to register her U.S. passport. She was waiting for her passports to be returned when she was arrested on new charges in October of that year.
Speaking to CBS News earlier this year, the journalist’s 15-year-old daughter, Bibi Butorin, said the family understood it was a risk for Kurmasheva to travel to Russia, “but she was only going for two weeks, and it was for my sick grandmother.”
“My mother is definitely my biggest inspiration,” Bibi said. “And I miss her so much that I can’t say it. And I worry a lot about her safety.”
Kurmasheva is listed as the editor of a book that features the stories of ordinary people who oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I know this book is problematic, it’s in her file,” Kurmasheva’s husband Pavel Butorin told CBS News. “There’s nothing inflammatory, nothing criminal in these stories. There’s no call for violence in the book. These are just opinions – not even Alsou’s. But as a journalist, she certainly has the right to collect and publish any opinion.”
RFE/RL has repeatedly called for his release.
In 2017, Russian authorities asked RFE/RL to register as a foreign agent, but it challenged Moscow’s use of foreign agent laws in the European Court of Human Rights. The organization was fined millions of dollars by Russia.
In February, RFE/RL was declared illegal in Russia as an undesirable organization.
The quick and secret trials of Kurmasheva and Gershkovich in Russia’s highly politicized justice system have raised hopes of a possible prisoner swap between Moscow and Washington. Russia has previously discussed a possible swap involving Gershkovich, but has said a verdict in her case must come first.
Arrests of Americans are becoming increasingly common in Russia. Nine U.S. citizens are being held in the country as tensions between the two countries have escalated over the fighting in Ukraine.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Moscow of treating “human beings as bargaining chips.” She singled out Gershkovich and a former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan53, a corporate security director from Michigan who is serving a 16-year sentence after being convicted of espionage charges that he and the U.S. government have always denied.
Gershkovich, 32, was arrested on March 29, 2023, while on a reporting assignment in the Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without providing any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the United States.
He has been behind bars since his arrest, time that will count toward his sentence. Most of his time was spent in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, a Tsarist-era detention center used during Joseph Stalin’s purges, where executions were carried out in its basement. He was transferred to Yekaterinburg for the trial.
Gershkovich is the first American journalist arrested for espionage since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War. Foreign journalists in Russia were shocked by Gershkovich’s arrest, even as the country has adopted increasingly repressive free speech laws since sending troops into Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden said after his conviction that Gershkovich “was targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American”.
