In a press conference yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia desires to “reach an agreement” with respect to the return to the United States of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. The reporter has been incarcerated for 250 days since his arrest for espionage against Russia.
Ever since his arrest, both the Journal and the U.S. government have vehemently denied that
Gershkovich is a U.S. spy.
Of course, such denials are pretty worthless, given that if Gershkovich really was a spy, it is likely that both the Journal and U.S. officials would deny it. In fact, if Gershkovich was, in fact, a spy for the CIA, it is likely that he and the CIA would keep that secret from the Journal, in which case the Journal’s denials would be in good faith while those of the CIA would be lies.
Moreover, it certainly would not surprise anyone if Gershkovich was a spy for the CIA. After all, don’t forget Operation Mockingbird, the CIA operation that made American journalists patriotic CIA assets.
One of the strange aspects of the Gershkovich case is that the Journal hasn’t revealed what his side of the story is. Usually an innocent person wants to get his side of the story out into the public realm in order to generate sympathy for his plight. By this time, one would think that Gershkovich has shared his story with his lawyers or with U.S. diplomats, who would be expected to share it with Journal officials. Yet, while steadfastly maintaining that Gershkovich isn’t a spy, the Journal, as far as I know, has never revealed Gershkovich’s side of the story, especially the circumstances surrounding his arrest.
My hunch is that Gershkovich isn’t a spy. That’s because he was writing very critical articles about Putin’s war on Ukraine while living in Russia and socializing with Russian friends. With large numbers of Russian soldiers being killed on a daily basis, that doesn’t seem to me to be the smartest thing for an actual spy to do, especially since Putin was having Russian critics of the war arrested and incarcerated. In fact, it still amazes me that Gershkovich’s bosses at the Journal didn’t have the wisdom and foresight to pull him out of Russia instead of leaving him there in the hope that Putin would respect his right of freedom of the press.
Of course, I don’t know the circumstances surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest, but my hunch is that he might have been the victim of a Russian sting operation. If a Russian source, for example, led Gershkovich to believe that he was delivering him some simply interesting documents when, in fact, they were top-secret government records, Russian goons could swoop in and quickly arrest Gershkovich on charges of espionage. Gershkovich would have a difficult time convincing Russian authorities that he didn’t know that he was receiving top-secret records and, anyway, that would be a defense at his trial, not a reason for summarily dismissing the charges.
After all, what if U.S. officials conducted a sting operation against a Russian citizen who vehemently claimed his innocence? We know that U.S. officials would arrest and prosecute that Russian, just as Russia is prosecuting Gershkovich. How do we know this? Because we know that DEA officials initiated a sting operation in Thailand against Russian citizen Viktor Bout regarding the sales of guns. Bout was then brought back to the United States, where he was tried, convicted, and incarcerated.
In fact, it is entirely possible that the Gershkovich arrest and prosecution are blowback arising from the sting operation that U.S. officials conducted against Bout.
But the much more likely possibility, in my opinion, is that the Gershkovich arrest and prosecution are much more likely to be blowback from the role that the Pentagon, operating through NATO, played in ginning up the war between Russia and Ukraine, the war that Gershkovich was writing about at the time of his arrest.
In a December 12, 2023, article, the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia has lost 90% of its prewar army, which means that 315,000 personnel have been killed or injured in Ukraine.
Yes, that is great victory for the Pentagon, whose objective was to provoke Russia into invading Ukraine and, in the process, have its military “degraded.” That was the whole idea of having NATO move eastward, absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and ultimately threatening to absorb Ukraine, which would enable the Pentagon to station its nuclear missiles, bases, troops, and other armaments on Russia’s border.
It’s a classic example of how U.S. interventionism makes life unsafe for American citizens. Every one of those dead and injured Russian soldiers had family or friends who are now grieving their losses. How could Russian officials or, for that matter, the Russian people have positive thoughts toward the United States and the American people after such a large death and injury toll?
Moreover, don’t forget that back in 1979 U.S. officials were gleeful at having provoked Russia into invading Afghanistan because they were certain that they had given Russia its own “Vietnam,” meaning that the invasion would bring about the deaths of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, just as the Pentagon had sacrificed tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War.
My hunch is that Gershkovich is paying the price for the U.S. decision to “degrade” Russia by having hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers killed and injured in its war with Ukraine. And I doubt he will be the last American victim of blowback from the Pentagon’s sick and sordid foreign policy.