US JOURNALIST EVAN Gershkovich is to be released in a prisoner swap, according to reports by US media. Former US Marine Paul Whelan is also set to be released.

Last month, Gershkovich, 32, who is a journalist with The Wall Street Journal, was sentenced to 16 years in prison on espionage charges. Both his employer and the United States rejected the verdict as a sham.

The Russian government has so far declined to comment on the details of the swap, but it is understood that the agreement is between Russia and a number of countries.

Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying for the US, and has been behind bars ever since.

He was the first US journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, at the height of the Cold War.

Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country has enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

Prison transfers are notoriously murky in Russia, where family are not warned in advance and prisoners often lose contact with their lawyers and the outside world for weeks.

As a rule, swaps can happen only after a conviction, and the disappearance of several high-profile political prisoners at once is extremely rare.

With reporting from © AFP 2024 and the Press Association.