THE INEVITABILITY of the espionage verdict against Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter, was never in doubt. Fully 99.85% of Russian trials end in conviction, and the Kremlin was not about to let this trumped-up affair prove an exception. The court sentenced Mr Gershkovich to 16 years of hard labour, just two years short of the prosecutors’ request. All eyes are on what happens next. The fact that the formal sentencing was brought forward by several weeks, at the insistence of Mr Gershkovich’s lawyers, suggested that a prisoner exchange may be in the offing.

Mr Gershkovich, who is 32, has already spent over a year in pre-trial detention. He was arrested on March 29th 2023, bundled away from a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, 1,400km east of Moscow, with a sweater pulled over his head. He had been working on assignment in Russia’s third city as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. At the time, he was accredited as a correspondent with Russia’s foreign ministry, and had thus been vetted by Russia’s federal security services.