BROADCASTS.com

Joshua Yaffa\xa0first met Evan Gershkovich after Gershkovich arrived in Moscow as a young reporter in 2017. As their friendship grew, Yaffa was impressed with the energy and passion Gershkovich brought to his job. \u201cHe had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia,\u201d Yaffa tells David Remnick. As the regime moved toward authoritarianism and then war, \u201cEvan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or na\xefve about the context in which he was working. He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to.\u201d Still, Yaffa says, there was little reason to think a foreign journalist would be targeted by Putin until Gershkovich was arrested in March and charged with espionage\u2014quite obviously a false accusation. It\u2019s the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter for spying since the nineteen-eighties, and a significant escalation of tensions between the countries. Yaffa, who has spoken with\xa0 Gershkovich\u2019s family,\xa0reflects on Gershkovich\u2019s reporting and life in Moscow, and what may lie ahead. \u201cI\u2019ve been sending him letters,\u201d Yaffa says. \u201cI tell him how proud I am of him, of course how worried I am about him\u2014but mainly how impressed I am.\u201d