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Perhaps Mr. Gershkovich was seized as a pawn to swap for Russians held within the West, because the American basketball participant Brittney Griner was in 2022. Perhaps it was as a result of Mr. Gershkovich’s dad and mom are Russian Jews who emigrated within the Nineteen Seventies, so Mr. Putin views him, as he views Ukraine, as inside his sphere of repression.
As the primary anniversary of Mr. Gershkovich’s incarceration approaches, there is no such thing as a proof of a possible commerce, although Mr. Putin did counsel final month that it might occur. And there is no such thing as a indication {that a} trial is imminent. Instead, Mr. Gershkovich will quickly have spent a yr at Lefortovo, which was constructed within the nineteenth century and was infamous within the Soviet period as an interrogation heart for political prisoners, who’re usually held in solitary confinement. Human contact is strictly restricted: Only attorneys are normally allowed to go to.
Ms. Kurmasheva, a twin Russian and American citizen, lived along with her husband and two daughters in Prague and labored there as an editor for R.F.E./R.L.’s Tatar-Bashkir service. She traveled to the Russian metropolis of Kazan final May to go to her ailing mom however was prevented from leaving, purportedly for failing to register her American passport. On Oct. 18 she was detained for failing to register as a “international agent,” and he or she has been held since.
Introduced in 2012, the international agent regulation has been a central function of Mr. Putin’s efforts to painting the West as a devious enemy searching for to undermine Russia. The regulation requires any group or particular person in Russia who receives cash from overseas to register as a “international agent,” a phrase that, in Russian, carries a transparent connotation of espionage. In December, authorities in Kazan started one more investigation of Ms. Kurmasheva, this one for spreading false details about the Russian Army, and on Feb. 1, her pretrial detention was prolonged for 2 months.
Her husband, Pavel Butorin, who additionally works for R.F.E./R.L., has mentioned he suspects the brand new case entails a e-book that Ms. Kurmasheva and her colleagues coedited known as “Saying No to War: 40 Stories of Russians Who Oppose the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” a set of radio interviews with Russian individuals who expressed their antiwar emotions in numerous methods. (One of them mentioned she was arrested for braiding a inexperienced ribbon in her hair.) Opposing the battle is against the law in Russia, and R.F.E./R.L. itself has been branded an “undesirable group,” placing Russians in danger for any reference to it.
