Woodward Offers Insight on Russian Detainment of American Journalist
In an interview with ABC News, John D. Woodward Jr., Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, discussed the recent arrest of Wall Street Journal report Evan Gershkovich by Russian authorities.
Some experts fear this is a case of hostage diplomacy, where arresting countries will take hostages under the pretense of a legal infraction to use as leverage against another country. These situations are difficult to navigate, especially as relations worsen between the two countries while they must negotiate terms of release. Woodward remarked that Gershkovich’s case was the latest iteration in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s history of wrongfully imprisoning American journalists, arguing that Putin uses hostage diplomacy to retrieve Russians incarcerated on American soil.
Woodward believes that it is possible that Putin could negotiate with Biden for the release of Gershkovich for a Russian detainee in the United States. However, Woodward was reluctant to comment on the expediency of such a prisoner swap, saying that Putin would not rush to act desperately on this matter. Similarly, Woodward remarked that “[he doesn’t] really expect any kind of benign attitude from the Russian government toward [Gershkovich], unfortunately.”
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John D. Woodward, Jr. is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. During his twenty-year CIA career, John served as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service and as a technical intelligence officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology, with assignments in Washington D.C., East Asia, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. His publications include Biometrics: Identity Assurance in the Information Age (McGraw-Hill, 2003) and Army Biometric Applications: Identifying and Addressing Sociocultural Concerns (RAND, 2001). Read more about Professor Woodward on his faculty profile.