NYT Moscow Bureau Chief on Evan Gershkovich

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, now, turning to an assault on press freedom abroad. Over 300 foreign correspondents who have worked in Russia are demanding the immediate release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. In a letter to the Russian government, they condemned Russia’s accusations of espionage and said that the arrest is “a disturbing and dangerous signal against honest journalism.” At the U.N. Security Council today, U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, also called out Russia for their violation of human rights and detention of American citizens.

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LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS: And right now, Evan Gershkovich is being wrongfully detained by the Russian government simply for doing his job as a respected journalist.

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GOLODRYGA: New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Anton Troianovski, discusses his latest reporting on Russia with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And Anton Troianovski, welcome to the show.

ANTON TROIANOVSKI, MOSCOW BUREAU CHIEF, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: Your friend, colleague, sometimes competitor, Evan Gershkovich, was detained, “The Wall Street Journal” reporter, in Russia. Before we get into the charges that they put against him, tell me a little about him as a person.

TROIANOVSKI: Well, he’s a brilliant journalist, a great friend. You know, you pointed out that he’s a competitor, which is strictly speaking true. He was working for “The Wall Street Journal” in Moscow. I was with “The New York Times.” But just an incredibly supportive colleague. You know, someone who would always reach out when you had a good story, someone who was never shy about sharing contacts or ideas. You know, he was really one of those correspondents when you’re working in a place like Moscow, where it can be tough to report, you really need journalists to support each other, and that’s what he was doing.

ISAACSON: You dealt with the story about some salmon roe that he brought, you kind of humanized him when I was reading them. Tell me about that.

TROIANOVSKI: Oh, of course. Well, we — so, I’ve been based in Berlin since last year. And —

ISAACSON: Because he had to leave Moscow, right, after the —

TROIANOVSKI: Exactly, exactly. And so, I’ve been based in Berlin. He was visiting Berlin. And he, for New Year’s, came to my house and brought some salmon roe, which they call red caviar in Russia. It’s kind of a traditional Russian food for New Year’s, and that was — you know, that’s how I really think about him now, someone who kind of was always very sharing and someone who really cared about Russia, which is a country where he grew up. His parents are Soviet emigres. He grew up in New Jersey, speaking Russian at home. And he was really interested and excited about being in Russia and getting to know the country, getting to know its traditions.

ISAACSON: Well, you and he share that in a way, coming from families that are Soviet or Russian emigre families. How does that give you an insight into the Russian soul? And what do you feel personally, both you and Evan, as you see what’s happening now?

TROIANOVSKI: Oh, it’s really, really tough, frankly. It’s true. Like I’m also from a Russian immigrant family to the United States and worked in Russia from 2018 as a journalist. It’s — you know, you could never certainly never have full insight into the Russian soul. But we did feel, I think both Evan and I, a special connection to the place, really a special responsibility to tell people as best we could about what was going on in Russia with its nuances, with its complexities, and that’s something that you saw Evan do, you know, he bravely continued to report from Russia after the war began. And he just really felt a special responsibility, a special duty as one of the few journalists, American journalists working there at the time to really tell people about what was going on. Speak to everyone he could, you know, both pro war and antiwar and try to explain to the world what was happening in Russia at this time.

ISAACSON: The Russians say he was arrested for espionage. The West says he’s unlawfully detained. Why do you think the Russian authorities did arrest him?

TROIANOVSKI: Yes. So, the charges are espionage, which are absurd. This is a journalist who was doing his job. I think this is really part of this overall escalation that you’re seeing in Putin’s conflict with the West, his conflict with the United States in particular. You know, we’ve had this crackdown on the free press in Russia for years now under Vladimir Putin. For most of that time, it really mainly affected the Russian press, Russian journalists who were jailed, exiled, in some cases even killed in the country. Now, it’s come — this crackdown has come to affect western journalists. I think the fact that Evan has an American passport made him more of a target. We’ve seen Russia practicing essentially hostage taking with American citizens as happened with Brittney Griner.

ISAACSON: Wait. Do you think that he might a hostage in a way, that he’s being taken so that he could be traded for somebody else?

TROIANOVSKI: I believe that that, unfortunately, is how you have to look at it. That’s what it looks like. You know, the Russians still have prisoners, people who are in prison in western countries that they apparently want back. We don’t know for certain that this is the case here. You know that, at this point, we can only speculate, though there have been Russian officials who have already been speculating about a prisoner exchange after Evan is convicted, which is something, you know, in the very Kremlin controlled judicial system in Russia that unfortunately we can expect to happen. But it’s also part, as they said, of this overall escalation of Putin’s conflict with the West, sort of yet another way to show the West that Putin is ready to take actions that would escalate this overall conflict.

ISAACSON: Isn’t this really the first time a western journalist since the Cold War has been arrested in Russia? And does that signal some new phase of this?

TROIANOVSKI: Yes. I think it does. The last time that a western journalist was arrested for espionage was not even in Russia, it was in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. And that was a case that took only a few weeks to play out until that correspondent, Nick Daniloff, was freed. In this case, again, it’s already taken longer. It’s already been close to a month that Evan has been detained. And it is, it’s a new thing. It’s — this very unpredictable phase, frankly, of the conflict, because this is one of those things that would have been really, really hard to imagine not long ago.

ISAACSON: You’ve written about an outburst of solidarity, I think you called it, among at least some segments of the Russian population in favor of Evan and perhaps in resistance to what’s happening in Russia. To what extent is that happening now, some pushback against what the Russian leaders are doing?

TROIANOVSKI: Well, overall, there’s — there is still push back inside the country. Thousands of people have been arrested, you know, for speaking out against the war. And this is — Russia has become a country where you can get a year’s long prison term for so much as criticizing the war and the Russian president on social media. So, there is still that kind of pushback happening, it’s just being repressed in an incredibly aggressive way. As for Evan, yes, I’ve been really moved by the outburst of solidarity from Russian journalists, most of whom are actually now in exile outside the country. Because, you know, it was — for a number of years, it was Evan and the rest of us, in the Western Press Corps, who were writing about the crackdown on Russian journalists and trying to kind of give voice to their plight. And now, those roles have been reversed. It’s Russian journalists who are helping western journalists try to figure out how to help Evan. You know, in that article, I wrote about how I was trying to send him a letter using this online letter writing service for Russian prisons, and the person who helped me was actually the fiancee of a Russian journalist who’s in prison right now and has been since 2020. She showed me how to use that service. So, that — just as of one tiny example of this great outburst of solidarity we’re seeing now.

ISAACSON: Do you think that the Russian people are generally supportive of this reaction against the West or is there some sentiment amongst the Russian people that they are better off being closer to the West?

TROIANOVSKI: That has really fluctuated, that sentiment. Obviously, there was a lot of pro-western sentiment 30 years ago when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Now, there’s a lot less of that. I think a really big reason is the propaganda, if you think about it. If you turn on the TV in Russia, no matter what channel, it’s going to be a pro Kremlin channel, where you will have hours of talk shows and newscasts every day telling you about why the West is evil, why the West, led by America, wants to destroy Russia and how Putin has, as Russian propaganda says, brought Russia up from its knees and made it, you know, an independent sovereign, powerful actor again on the world stage. So, there are many people who believe that. There are also people, as I was saying earlier, who despite this repression are still trying to speak out and say, you know, to their fellow Russians that what’s happening now is wrong. But there’s also a big set, I think, of the population that just, you know, it sees that there’s nothing, really, they can do about this situation. That — the fact that Putin appears to be firmly in power, there aren’t any political groups that we can see that could challenge him in the near term. So, when people see there’s nothing, really, they can change about a situation, I think they also look for ways to kind of rationalize it in their mind or pay as little attention as possible. And I think you’ve got it big group of Russians inside the country who feel that way.

ISAACSON: Russian opposition leader, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced to 25 years in prison this past week for opposing the Ukraine war, fortreason. He was actually on his way to be on this show when he got arrested. Tell me about that sentence. Is it unusually harsh and what does it signal?

TROIANOVSKI: That’s an incredibly harsh sentence, even by Russian standards. You know, even people who are convicted of murder typically get a shorter sentence than 25 years in Russia. So, it tells us that, again, this escalation in repression is continuing. Another key thing to point out here, as you said, is he was convicted of treason and the treasonous actions that he took in the narrative of the government are that he spoke out against the war and about — and against Vladimir Putin. And so, that tells you that now speaking out against the leadership of Russia can be tantamount to treason. And this comes as, you know, both Putin and others in the Russian leadership are referring to people who are against the war, who are pro-western as potential traitors. And that just tells you how incredibly repressive the environment is inside Russia, and the fact that when it comes to these kinds of repressive actions, we, frankly, can only expect them to get more and more intense.

ISAACSON: A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a big deal in the United States and the West about putting on crushing sanctions we set. We said it was going to bring the Russian economy down and especially hurt the oligarchs. And yet, you’re reporting shows that hasn’t happened. Why?

TROIANOVSKI: Well, look, the sanctions have certainly affected Russia’s economy. They have led to some decline in the country’s economic output. But it’s been limited and the government has found ways to really reduce the impact of those sanctions. So, you know, western cars are no longer being officially imported into Russia. But there are all kinds of parallel exports schemes, as they call them, that allow Russia — that allow cars and other western consumer goods to be imported into Russia through other countries that aren’t part of the sanctions. You know, Chinese car manufacturers have become huge in Russia and other Chinese consumer electronics. So, you know western companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s and Ikea have left the country. But there are local alternatives that have been popping up. And so, you know, it’s — and at the same time, the overall economy kind of continues to keep going. There is not mass unemployment or —

ISAACSON: How did we miscalculate the sanctions so badly then?

TROIANOVSKI: Well, I think, these sanctions were incredibly aggressive. You know, they were more intense than we’ve seen pretty much any sections —

ISAACSON: But the Russian economy is not doing much worse than other economies at the moment?

TROIANOVSKI: Well, I think what we’ve seen is the success of the Russian government’s planning for this kind of thing. You know, we’ve been talking for a number of years that Putin has been working on sanctions proofing his economy, piling up reserves, you know, through the country’s central bank.

ISAACSON: But you say he’s even getting hard technology. I mean, we were supposed to stop some of the technology, some of the chips, but even those are getting in, right?

TROIANOVSKI: Yes, yes. I mean, because there are many countries around the world that are not participating in the sanctions, like China, like India, like all of the Central Asian countries, you know, that border Russia in to the south in Asia. So, there are still many places that Putin can turn to around the world as economic partners. And at the same time and his economy really functions in the way that it’s just not as susceptible to western sanctions as it would have been just five, 10 years ago.

ISAACSON: You’ve been writing a lot about the leaks of national security documents from the United States. First of all, tell me what those leaks. Tell us about what’s happening inside the Kremlin.

TROIANOVSKI: Well, there was one in — one document in particular that pointed to some competition between the FSB, which is the domestic intelligence agency that used to be called the KGB in Soviet days and the Russian military. According to one of those documents, it looks like the FSB is saying that internally the Russian military is saying there are fewer casualties of the war on the Russian side than there really are. At the same time, we did not see much in those documents that would show that the United States has direct knowledge of what’s happening inside Putin’s inner circle. Obviously, those documents are very small, tiny subset of what American intelligence agencies know, but, you know, it really — we are not seeing much evidence that the U.S. has that deep inside into the Kremlin that a lot of people are looking for.

ISAACSON: Anton Troianovski, thank you so much for joining us.

TROIANOVSKI: Thank you, Walter.