Russian president called WSJ reporter an ‘idiot’ and believed he was a spy

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich writes in a forthcoming memoir that Vladimir Putin privately insisted he was an intelligence operative, once slamming a table and calling him an idiot while defending his arrest to an unnamed foreign leader. Gershkovich spent 16 months in Russian detention after his March 2023 arrest in Yekaterinburg and was sentenced to 16 years before being freed in an August 2024 prisoner exchange.

In the memoir, Gershkovich argues Russia's FSB staged the circumstances of his arrest, using two meetings with a factory union source to build a case that persuaded Putin the journalist was genuinely spying. Putin publicly maintained during the detention that Gershkovich was caught red-handed, a claim he repeated in a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson.

Gershkovich, his employer, and the U.S. government have consistently denied the espionage allegation. The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment on the account, which appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land, out September 29.

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