Princeton native Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who had been held in a Russian prison for more than 16 months, was freed in a dramatic prison swap on Thursday. He was arrested in March 2023 and charged with espionage during a reporting trip in the country.
Along with Gershkovich, about two dozen others were freed as part of an exchange in Turkey, including Paul Whelan, a former United States Marine.
New Jersey Governor Phill Murphy had been working with U.S. officials to have Gershkovich released.
“Thrilled that New Jersey native and Princeton High School graduate Evan Gershkovich has been freed from Russia,” Murphy wrote on social media Thursday. “Thank you to @POTUS and our allies involved in this complex, multilateral negotiation for your work to bring Evan and other wrongfully detained Americans home.”
Gershkovich is the child of Russian Jewish émigrés and graduated from Princeton High School in 2010. He was captain of the high school’s soccer team, which won the state championship.
His parents fled to America from the Soviet Union in 1979.
Last month, Gershkovich, 32, was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security Russian prison, in a trial that the U.S. regarded as a sham. He pleaded not guilty; he’d been accused of gathering information on the Russian military, which the Wall Street Journal disputed.
Gershkovich had been held in Russia’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. His conviction was thought to open the way for a prison swap between the U.S. and Russia.
His parents, Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman, spoke about their son on Good Morning America in March. They said they wrote him letters and that his father had even been playing long-distance chess with him.
In 2018, a couple that had been living in Montclair, Cynthia and Richard Murphy, were revealed to be Russian “sleeper” spies and were part of a prison swap that returned them to Russia. Their two daughters, who grew up in Montclair, were also part of the swap.