As reported just two days ago, there is an update on the status of HOSTAGE Evan Gershkovich . . . and it isn’t good. After being held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison for 441 days, without evidentiary support, he has finally been told that he will be returned to Yekaterinburg, where he was initially arrested, for trial on the charge of espionage.

Quite obviously, “due process of law” is defined differently in Russia than in the United States, or in the rest of the free world — 441 days without being formally charged!

For more than a year, Gershkovich has been the subject of intense negotiations — initiated by the United States — for a prisoner swap. He came close earlier this year, when there was talk of a “package deal” — Gershkovich, fellow American HOSTAGE Paul Whelan, and possibly Russian dissident Alexei Navalny — in exchange for Russian hit man Vadim Krasikov, convicted and imprisoned in Germany for the flagrant daytime assassination of a Chechen warlord. But that negotiation collapsed when Navalny suddenly and mysteriously died in the Siberian penal colony where he was serving combined 30-year sentences on bogus charges of “extremism.”

Why the sudden movement by the Russian legal system (such as it is) on Gershkovich’s case? In the labyrinthine mind of Vladimir Putin, there could be any number of reasons. The one that leaps immediately to my mind is an ultimatum: there is something he wants, and wants badly enough to use an innocent young man’s life as collateral. And — like a child on the playground — if he doesn’t get his own way, he’ll simply take his toys and go home.

But the stakes here are not a game. And Putin knows it. So, as always, we wait for him to show his hand.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/16/24

*. *. *

And please — once again — let us not forget the other HOSTAGES, still wasting away in various Russian prisons and penal colonies for the simple act of disagreeing with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly onerous edicts. It is for them that this regular Sunday posting is written.

To those known . . .

Vladimir Kara-Murza – HOSTAGE
Evan Gershkovich – HOSTAGE
Paul Whelan – HOSTAGE
Ilya Yashin – HOSTAGE
Robert Woodland Romanov – HOSTAGE
Boris Akunin – HOSTAGE
Marc Hilliard Fogel – HOSTAGE
Asya Kazantseva – HOSTAGE
Ilya Barabanov – HOSTAGE
Alsu Kurmasheva – HOSTAGE
Aleksandr Skobov – HOSTAGE
Antonina Favorskaya – HOSTAGE
Oleg Orlov – HOSTAGE
Boris Kagarlitsky – HOSTAGE
Oleg Navalny – HOSTAGE
Ksenia Karelina – HOSTAGE
Ksenia Fadeyeva – HOSTAGE
Lilia Chanysheva – HOSTAGE
Vadim Ostanin – HOSTGE
Sergei Udaltsov – HOSTAGE
Konstantin Gabov – HOSTAGE
Danuta Perednya – HOSTAGE
Olesya Krivtsova – HOSTAGE
Staff Sgt. Gordon Black – HOSTAGE

. . . and those hundreds of others whose names remain unknown to me . . . you are not forgotten, nor have you been abandoned. The fight continues on your behalf.

Brendochka
6/16/24