Imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich said he is “not losing hope” and joked about prison food in a letter to his family — his first since being arrested last month in Russia on espionage charges.
“I want to say that I am not losing hope,” he wrote in Russian to his family in Philadelphia, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. “I read. I exercise. And I am trying to write. Maybe, finally, I am going to write something good.”
The handwritten letter, dated April 5, was received by the family nine days later. It marks their first direct contact with Gershkovich, 31, since his March 29 arrest.
In it, he gently teased his mom, Ella Milman, about the fare he’s been served while being held in a Russian prison.
“Mom, you unfortunately, for better or worse, prepared me well for jail food,” Gershkovich. “In the morning, for breakfast, they give us hot creamed wheat, oatmeal cereal or wheat gruel. I am remembering my childhood.”
The letter was addressed to his “dear family” — his mother, father Mikhail and sister Danielle.
They spoke to the Wall Street Journal for the first time in an interview that was published Friday.
His mother said she felt “great joy” at receiving the letter.
“These are my son’s words, not someone else telling me,” she said. “And his spirit is shining.”
Gershkovich also joked about a care package of socks, toiletries, writing materials and slippers he received in prison from friends.
“I now have more clothes and stuff than mom and dad at home, I think,” he wrote in the letter.
Gershkovich has had supervised visits with Russian lawyers but none so far from US embassy officials, the newspaper reported.
On Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russia was not meeting its “obligation” as he continued to demand that Moscow allow US embassy officials to visit Gershkovich.
“We continue to seek consular access that has not yet been granted. It needs to be. This is a Russian obligation, and so we’re looking to that,” Blinken told reporters in Vietnam.
“We continue to call for his immediate release, and certainly we need to see consular access now,” he continued.
The situation involving Gershkovich, who the US determined was “wrongfully detained,” is now being handled by the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, Blinken said.
Moscow had not provided a legitimate explanation for why US embassy officials haven’t been able to visit with Gershkovich, a State Department official said last week.
And the US has cited the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, an agreement signed by Washington and Moscow, that states officials have the right to visit one of their citizens “in prison, custody or detention, to converse and correspond with him and to arrange for his legal representation.”
Gershkovich was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg and accused of trying to obtain classified information about a military facility.
He is the first foreign reporter to face spying charges in Russia since the Cold War.