A court has convicted Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded station, of spreading false information about the Russian military and sentenced her 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 Friday, the same day that a court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison in a case the United States called politically motivated.
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 that this American citizen, our dear colleague, be reunited with her loving family,” Capus said in a statement to the AP.
Kurmasheva, who has both US and 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 collecting information on the Russian military.
She was later also charged with spreading “false information” about the Russian military under a law that effectively criminalized 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. RFE/RL has repeatedly called for her 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.
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”.
