“He will be HOME, SAFE, AND WITH HIS FAMILY. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, will do that for me, but not for anyone else, and WE WILL BE PAYING NOTHING!”
But as the swap took place Thursday, anti-Trump commentators observed that even Putin didn’t wait for Donald Trump’s re-election.
“Even Putin sees the writing on the wall. Trump is toast. Biden delivers again. Thanks, Joe!!’ a social media post read.
32-year-old Evan Gershkovich spent 16 months in a Russian jail after he was arrested in Moscow on charges of collecting sensitive military information for CIA. He became the first American journalist since Cold War to be arrested in Russia. A Russian court handed him a 16-year sentence in a secret trial in July 2024 following which there was diplomatic persuasion. The US government and the Wall Street Journal rejected the charges while the Kremlin insisted that Evan was caught spying red-handed.
Gerskovich is a New Jerset native who learned Russian from his parents. After graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, he was hired as an assistant at the New York Times before moving to Russia in 2017 to work for the English-language Moscow Times newspaper and then for the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
In January 2022, the Wall Street Journal hired him and he was weeks into his posting when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. “Reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years,” he posted on Twitter five months after the war began. on March 29, 2023, during a trip to the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, he was arrested while dining in a restaurant. The FSB security service said he had been collecting information about Uralvagonzavod, a factory that makes tanks for the Ukraine war.
Source : Times of India
