FIRSTHAND

WSJ’s Evan Gershkovich Publishes First Story Since Russian Prison Release

The reporter, freed in a prisoner swap in August, was falsely deemed a CIA agent.

In his first story since being wrongly imprisoned in Russia for a year-and-a-half, the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich describes previously unreported details about the organization responsible for it, as well as his initial detainment and his release this past August. Gershkovich and his co-authors write how the Department of Counterintelligence Operations, known as DKRO, arrests Americans in Russia for use as “trade bait” for Russian prisoners in Western countries. “DKRO is the Kremlin’s most elite security force. It wields the power to compel hundreds of thousands of personnel across Russia into surveilling, intimidating, or arresting foreigners and the Russians it suspects of working with them,” the report states. Of his arrest in March 2023 on false charges of being a CIA agent, Gershkovich writes, “...The chief investigator on my case explained that I had been arrested and charged as a CIA agent because DKRO had said that’s what I was. ‘That’s enough for me,' the investigator said.” The reporter and his colleagues were also able to identify the official who leads DKRO, and who was on board the plane with Gershkovich, American Paul Whelan, and other prisoners before the swap: Lt. Gen. Dmitry Minaev, who “has a hands-on role in selecting which Americans to arrest, and which Russians to trade them for.”