What the Russian arrest tapes of Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan really tell us

CNN
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Pro-Kremlin media in Russia know how to create an alternative reality, and last week’s historic prisoner exchange was no exception.

On Monday, Russian state-backed media showed viewers shocking footage of the arrests of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.

There is no doubt about where the videos were filmed: Gershkovich was arrested last year at the Bukovsky Grill, a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg; Whelan was arrested at the Metropol Hotel, just across the street from the Bolshoi Theatre in central Moscow.

But don’t take anything at face value from these heavily edited videos. Yes, we see Gershkovich being brutally detained and pushed to the ground. And we see Paul Whelan handcuffed on a hotel bed, surrounded by Russian security officers.

But despite the assurances of its Russian-language narrator, there is little in the text to support Moscow’s claims that both men engaged in espionage — allegations that the U.S. government, the Whelan and Gershkovich families, and their supporters vehemently deny.

Instead, we see classic examples of the Russian art of “black PR”: using the media as a weapon to attack individuals and destroy reputations. The arrest footage is sparse on information but rich in innuendo, as Gershkovich and Whelan meet with people before their arrests—suggesting through the power of B-movie imagery that both men were involved in some kind of fraud.

Russia has long used black PR and kompromat to make life difficult for foreign diplomats it seeks to harass. In 2009, the U.S. State Department raised a fuss over what it called a doctored video that appeared on a Russian website and appeared to show a State Department employee having sex with a prostitute.

Russian state television also likes to highlight spy scandals: in January 2006, a state television station aired a video of British spies using a fake rock to hide electronic equipment, a report that was clearly intended to ridicule the British government.

But in the case of Gershkovich and Whelan, the Russian state’s goal was to build a bank of human collateral that could be traded for valuable agents held abroad. And for domestic Russian audiences, the now-released footage of their arrests is intended to send a message that Russia is infiltrated by foreign enemies—and that its powerful, all-seeing security state never lets its guard down.

The most chilling feature of the footage is the suggestion of provocation. In both arrests, the footage suggests hidden cameras were in place, recording from multiple angles, and that security forces had staged the situation to some extent.

In a statement, Wall Street Journal publisher and Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour and Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker condemned the video featuring Gershkovich, calling it a brazen attempt to frame a journalist who was legitimately doing his job.

“Vladimir Putin and his regime in Russia are waging an all-out assault on the free press,” they said. “This video is just the latest evidence that Russia will stop at nothing in its methodical effort to destroy honest journalism. Evan was doing his job as a journalist, and any portrayal to the contrary is a fiction. Journalism is not a crime.”

Certainly, the spying tools allegedly discovered at the scene of Gershkovich’s arrest – one of the recordings shows his notebooks, pens, and smartphone – underscore the manipulative nature of the recordings.

But the good news is that Gershkovich has now left Russian custody and can now write a definitive and credible account of what happened during his arrest.