MOSCOW, June 26, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter due to face trial in Russia on Wednesday, has spent over a year in jail on spying charges the US sees as a Kremlin ploy to secure prisoner swaps with the West.

The US-born son of Soviet emigres had reported from Russia for six years, remaining after dozens of other Western journalists left in the wake of Moscow's Ukraine offensive.

The 32-year-old's arrest for spying in March 2023 showed the Kremlin was prepared to go further than ever before in what President Vladimir Putin has called a "hybrid war" with the West.

Gershkovich, his employer and the White House have rejected the spying allegations, the first levelled against a Western reporter in Russia since the Soviet era.

Until now, he had been kept in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison, known for keeping inmates in isolation.

In brief court appearances when his pre-trial detention has been extended every few months he has appeared cheerful and smiling.

He will now return for a closed-door trial in the city of Yekaterinburg, where he was arrested almost 15 months ago.

Russia has provided no public evidence for the charges against Gershkovich, saying only that he spied on a tank factory in the Urals region.

The Wall Street Journal has called the accusation bogus and says he was arrested for "simply doing his job".

He faces 20 years in a prison colony if found guilty.

- 'You love this country' -

Raised in New Jersey, Gershkovich is a fluent Russian speaker and avid cook.

He arrived in Russia in 2017 to work for a small English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, and quickly produced some of the outlet's biggest stories on a shoe-string budget.

He briefly worked for AFP, reporting on forest fires in Siberia, a crackdown on the opposition and Moscow downplaying the effects of the pandemic.

Weeks before the Kremlin launched its Ukraine offensive, he landed his dream job: Moscow correspondent with the Wall Street Journal.

In the job, he reported extensively on how ordinary Russians experienced the Ukraine conflict, speaking to the families of dead soldiers.

Gershkovich's parents escaped from repression and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

His mother, Ella Milman, told AFP this year she was initially happy he made a life for himself in a country that she and his father had fled.

"It was amazing," she said. "I told him I left this country and you love this country -- and what a change."

- 'Still standing strong' -

"We never anticipated this situation happening to our son and brother, let alone a full year with no certainty or clear path forward," the Gershkovich family said in a letter published by the Wall Street Journal this year.

"But despite this long battle, we are still standing strong," they added.

Gershkovich himself, too, appears to be going strong.

In one photo taken near a Moscow court, he appeared smiling to a man in a balaclava as he was led, handcuffed, through snow.

He has appeared not to lose his playful sense of humour that friends describe.

In the first hand-written letter out of jail to his parents, he wrote:

"Mom, you unfortunately, for better or worse, prepared me well for jail food."

The US ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, has repeatedly said that Gershkovich is in "good spirits" when she has visited him in jail.

The reporter shared a small cell with another inmate at Lefortovo.

- 'Deeply cared' -

His sister, Danielle, said she could imagine her brother "making friends" inside the prison.

He gets an hour-long walk in a small prison yard every day, tries to stay fit through exercise and relies on fruit and vegetables sent by friends to supplement the meagre prison diet.

Gershkovich was intent on staying as long as possible despite friends leaving Russia, both in the Western and Russian independent press.

Friends say his character -- open, gregarious, and extremely sociable -- made Gershkovich's reporting even better.

He "could make any source comfortable, because they always felt he deeply cared about the story", close friend Pjotr Sauer said.

His parents say they are counting on a "very personal" promise from President Joe Biden to bring him home.

"For me it's devastating to know how much he's missed, how much time he's lost," his sister Danielle told AFP.

"I miss him more and more every day."