At Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, President Joe Biden demanded the release of jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is now awaiting trial on espionage charges in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. From the podium, the president also acknowledged Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman, Evan’s parents, as well as Evan’s sister, Danielle, and her husband, who were guests of the Journal. 

The president called for the immediate release of Evan and Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared into Syrian captivity over a decade ago. The whole room of over 2,000 guests stood and clapped. All weekend, denizens of #thistown wore #freeEvan and “Free Austin Tice” pins on their tuxes and gowns. A smiling, short-haired Brittney Griner got a special shout-out from the president during the dinner. “I can hardly wait to see you back on the court, kid,” he said, grinning, before reminding her that she had promised him and his granddaughter tickets to her first game back. “I got you, I got you,” Griner responded amid the din of applause. 

The message was clear. “I’m working like hell to bring them back,” Biden said of Gershkovich, Tice, and Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year sentence in Russia on espionage charges. Griner’s presence in the audience, and on the party circuit this weekend, was proof positive that the president was a man of his word. If Brittney had come back, then surely Evan, Austin, and Paul would, too.

If only it were just up to Biden. Behind the scenes, the mood among Biden administration officials with insight into Gershkovich’s detainment is much more dour. “The jailor holds the key,” one senior administration official told me. And so far, White House and State officials tell me, they’ve seen no desire on the part of the jailor to engage. 

In the weeks since Gershkovich was arrested in Ekaterinburg, Toria Nuland, the powerful Undersecretary of State for political affairs and a Russia hawk loathed by Moscow, summoned Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov to Foggy Bottom to make known the U.S. government’s displeasure. Lynne Tracy, Washington’s new ambassador to Moscow, relayed the message to the foreign ministry there, and Tony Blinken pressed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Gershkovich’s detention. The administration has also hinted that they have other, private channels to the Kremlin going to see if a deal can be reached.

But administration officials I’ve spoken to say that Moscow appears to be in absolutely no mood to negotiate, so much so that they haven’t even articulated what they would want in exchange for Gershkovich’s release. Not only is Biden open to a prisoner swap, but White House officials have told me they have even dangled the possibility of some narrow sanctions relief.

Still, nothing. “We don’t know what they want,” a second senior administration official confessed. Said a senior State Department official, “I think it’s still really unclear now. I don’t think the Russians are communicating what they want yet.” The first senior administration official told me, “they haven’t offered anyone yet.”

The Griner Juxtaposition

The White House does have a pretty good idea of how this is going to go for Gershkovich, and the odds are that it’s going to make Griner’s ordeal look short and easy by comparison. Griner, after all, was arrested for holding a tiny amount of weed, pleaded guilty, and the trial was wrapped up quickly. She was sentenced to nine years out of the maximum ten. Gershkovich, on the other hand, has been charged with espionage. It is, of course, not true. Evan was simply doing his job as a journalist. But even taken at face value, even in a kangaroo court, that is far more serious than a straightforward drug charge. 

It’s different, too, from the case of Trevor Reed who was serving a nine-year sentence for allegedly drunkenly brawling with a Russian cop and later freed in a prisoner exchange in the spring of 2022. Espionage is a very scary charge, in part because it is so murky and open to interpretation, and calls for a closed trial with secret evidence, some of which the defendant is not allowed to see. It also carries a sentence of an entirely different magnitude: up to 20 years in one of Russia’s many penal colonies, which haven’t changed much since the days of the Gulag. 

One Biden official told me on the sidelines of a party this weekend that they worried that the Russian government might believe Gershkovich really is a spy, which has been the problem with Whelan from the outset. The Kremlin, which has a long track record of believing its own bullshit, is apparently convinced that Whelan, a former Marine who was in Russia for a friend’s wedding, is, in fact, a C.I.A. agent and so will only give him up in exchange for a jailed Russian spy. 

The Biden administration has already made an offer to the Kremlin for Whelan, but the Kremlin has rebuffed it, asking instead for Vadim Krasikov, an F.S.B. agent serving a life sentence in Germany. (Krasikov carried out a hit, killing someone in a Berlin park in the middle of the afternoon in 2019.) “It’s fundamentally an unserious offer if it’s not someone in our custody,” a third senior administration official told me. “It’s not somebody that we can put on the table. If there are parties that are willing to engage”—that is, third countries that would offer up a Russian in their custody to spring an American out of a Russian jail—“we’re not taking tools out of our toolkit here.”

Regardless, that wouldn’t happen for a while. Russian officials have publicly said that they would only think about swapping Gershkovich after his trial and sentencing are complete. Unfortunately, that is bad news for Gershkovich. “The answer is a harsh one, but if our comparison is what Paul Whelan went through”—a closed trial with secret evidence during which Whelan pleaded not guilty—“that process took about a year and a half,” said the first senior administration official, before adding, “That doesn’t mean we’re content to sit and wait.” 

The third administration official offered a similar assessment. “Our sense is that they’d like to go through the trial process before things start to move and that can take a couple of years,” they said. “I’m not hyper-optimistic that it’ll go differently than the past. They’re looking to extract pain.” Which is why, when I asked the State Department official if they had any sense of whether the Russian government really believed Gershkovich is a spy, they responded, “whether they really think he’s a spy vs whether they treat him like a spy unfortunately in this case is a distinction without a difference.” This official too believes that Gershkovich is likely to be in a Russian jail for “a couple years.”

The Griner case, however, does offer some hope. When I spoke to White House officials last summer, about six months after Griner’s arrest in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, they were similarly despondent. The Kremlin wasn’t saying what it wanted; it refused to even come to the table. There was little sense that a breakthrough would happen, let alone that year. And then, suddenly, by Christmas, Griner was home with her wife, Cherelle. According to the third senior administration official, the Kremlin dragged its feet through the fall because it didn’t want to give Biden and the Democrats a win ahead of the November midterms. Once they were over, negotiations moved quickly and the White House had a deal in about a month.  

Does that mean there won’t be a deal on Gershkovich until after the 2024 election? No one knows. But no one in the Biden administration expects a quick resolution to Gershkovich’s arrest, which happened just over a month ago. And though it is a cruel twist of fate that Gershkovich’s parents left the Soviet Union as refugees only to have their child be swallowed up by a neo-Soviet system, at least they are intimately familiar with the authoritarian culture, F.S.B.-dominated culture they’re facing. Said the third administration official, “His parents are pretty aware and resigned to how challenging this is going to be.”