Not to be one to say I told you so, but I told you so, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. Everyone with half a brain did. When Joe Biden agreed to trade the world’s most notorious arms dealer for the release of a WNBA basketball player in Russia, it was predicted that Mad Vlad and his minions would become even more emboldened to snatch Americans as hostages. That is exactly what happened. Case in point – Evan Gershkovich.

Gershkovich is an American journalist and reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering Russia. He was detained and accused of espionage by the Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB. This marks the first time an American journalist had been detained since the Cold War. Thanks, Joe.

Mr. Gershkovich, 31 years old, is the American son of Soviet-born Jewish exiles who had settled in New Jersey. He fell in love with Russia—its language, the people he chatted with for hours in regional capitals, the punk bands he hung out with at Moscow dive bars. Now, espionage charges leave him facing a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Five and a half years earlier, Mr. Gershkovich showed up in Russia as media freedoms were fading. He spent his weekends chatting about music, politics and the news in the banya, or sauna, and was always ready to help competing journalists. His Russian friends knew him not as Evan, but Vanya.

When forest fires swept through the remote Siberian region of Yakutia in 2021, he slept in a tent in the woods for four days, long after other reporters jetted back to the capital. He won the trust of freshman medical students by sitting with them in Covid-19 wards as they revealed that they’d been enlisted, after only a few weeks of training, to treat a flood of patients.

“I just want to get the story right,” he would tell friends.

He sounds like the kind of reporter we need these days. Everyone denies he is a spy – The Wall Street Journal, his colleagues, and the Biden administration. All call for his immediate release. Unfortunately, diplomats and legal experts don’t see much hope of his release any time soon. Espionage trials in Russia are conducted in secret and they usually end in a conviction.

Evan is accredited by the Russian foreign ministry. Now he is caught up in an emboldened Russia grabbing Americans to make a deal. The Biden administration claims that it isn’t clear why he was taken into custody.

On Thursday, National Security Council Strategic Coordinator John Kirby said it wasn’t clear if Mr. Gershkovich’s detention was coordinated with Russian leadership or retaliation for other grievances. Last week, a Russian national was charged in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., with acting as an agent of a foreign power, visa fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and other charges, according to the Justice Department.

Ms. Griner’s detention ended decades of cooperation between Russia and the U.S. on sports. Mr. Gershkovich’s jailing challenges the bedrock notion that American reporters, authors, and researchers could work in Russia to learn about the vast and complicated country and its escalating conflict with the West. Nearly all Western journalists have pulled out of Russia, an exodus accelerated by Mr. Gershkovich’s arrest.

On Friday, the Journal withdrew its Moscow bureau chief, a veteran correspondent who has covered the country since the final years of the Cold War. Many Western news agencies that posted reporters to Moscow under Stalin have determined that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is too dangerous for journalism.

He has not been granted access to the lawyer The Wall Street Journal hired for him. Evan is being held at the SB’s Lefortovo prison, the same prison where former Marine Paul Whelan was jailed in 2020, also on espionage charges. Whelan is serving a 16-year sentence.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a rare phone call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express “grave concern” over Evan’s detention. He called for Evan’s immediate release. He also called for the release of Paul Whelan. Whelan was rumored to be a part of the Brittney Griner release deal but in the end, he was not. He still sits in a Russian prison colony.

In its summary of the call, Russia’s foreign ministry said Lavrov “drew Blinken’s attention to the need to respect the decisions of the Russian authorities” about Gershkovich, whom Moscow claims, without evidence, “was caught red-handed.”

The Journal has adamantly denied the allegations and demanded his release. U.S. officials have also called on Russia to let him go, with President Joe Biden telling reporters on Friday that his message to the country was “Let him go.”

The Kremlin said Lavrov also told Blinken it was unacceptable for U.S. officials and Western news media to continue “whipping up excitement” and politicizing the journalist’s detention. “His further fate will be determined by the court.”

It doesn’t sound good for the reporter. Unfortunately, world leaders have no respect for Joe Biden and he is feared by none of them. Ever since Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan so horribly, killing thirteen American service members and injuring many others, not to mention leaving thousands behind, in the first year of his administration, Biden’s reputation on the world stage has not recovered. Trump, in contrast, did well in securing the release of Americans being detained overseas. That’s bound to sting for Biden.

I hope Evan is released soon, though with Putin’s war in Ukraine ongoing and no end in sight, it isn’t likely. Evan and Paul Whelan and other Americans being held in Russia are pawns in Putin’s land grab. It’s going to take more than a weak-sounding “Let him go” from Biden and/or Blinken.