He also raised the example of a judge who remanded the country's late opposition leader Alexei Navalny into custody in 2021 for breaching probation for an earlier trumped-up charge – because he was recovering from being poisoned with Novichok.
WNBA star Brittney Griner is sending words of hope to Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who last year became the first journalist working for a U.S. outlet to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War.
His lawyers can file an appeal, but if they don't or are unsuccessful, Gershkovich will have to serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony, where conditions will be harsh.
After many foreign correspondents left Russia amid the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the passage of wartime censorship laws, Gershkovich returned to Russia to report on how the country was being reshaped by the war.
