Russia’s Secret Trial for Gershkovich, EU’s Rightward Shift, Boeing in Space, and More

ROBBINS:
In the coming week, American journalist Evan Gershkovich goes on secret trial in Russia. Europe deals with the fallout from EU parliamentary elections. And Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is due to return from the International Space Station after a nearly two-week delay. It's June 20th, 2024, and time for The World Next Week.

I'm Carla Anne Robbins, and today we're joined again by Miriam Elder, filling in for Bob McMahon, who's escaping the east coast heat on a well-deserved vacation. Miriam is the Edward R. Murrow press fellow here at the council. She's a reporter and editor with a great amount of expertise in Russia, which she covered for the Moscow Times and the Guardian. She's also been an editor at BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair. Miriam, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for coming back.

ELDER:
I'm so happy to be here, Carla.

ROBBINS:
So, let's start today in Russia where a court has now announced that an espionage trial for Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, will begin on June 26, and it's going to be conducted in secret. Evan, another highly respected journalist with long experience in Russia, has been held on these trumped-up charges in Russia's Lefortovo prison, and this is a really horrible place, for nearly fifteen months. What does it mean that that case is finally going ahead?

ELDER:
That's right, Carla, Evan is set to go on trial next Wednesday at a regional court in Yekaterinburg, which is around nine hundred miles east of Moscow. That's where he was arrested in March of last year. Since then, as you mentioned, he's been held in Lefortovo, which is a Tsarist-era prison in Moscow. It's notorious for the isolation it imposes on those inside.

So the state is accusing Evan of espionage, a charge that he, the Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government vehemently deny, and most cases involving national security are held in secret, so no journalists will be allowed in the courtroom. The State Department said this week that they'll try to have embassy officials inside, but they're not sure if that'll be allowed.

As for what it means, a trial will undoubtedly be difficult. Remember that more than 99 percent of Russian court cases end in conviction. The judge on this trial once told an interviewer that he's only ever acquitted three or four people in his twenty-plus-year career. So since for most trials in Russia you can fairly confidently expect a guilty verdict, a lot of attention is put on sentencing, Evan faces up to twenty years in prison.

There is counterintuitively a window of optimism here though. In those cases where Russia engages in prisoner swaps or releases people early, it tends to do so after a verdict has been handed down, so that Evan's case is moving ahead could give some hope that some sort of a swap might be possible.

ROBBINS:
If there's a swap, we know that in Brittney Griner, they were looking for a particular swap, is there someone the Russians are looking to get?

ELDER:
That's right. The Russians got their biggest prize in December 2022 when they traded Griner for Viktor Bout, a major arms dealer. There just aren't high value Russian assets in American prisons right now. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, you might remember that Putin appeared to suggest that Gershkovich could be swapped for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian security officer who is serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Chechen Georgian dissident there. This weekend, interestingly, the Journal ran a big story on a couple of Russian illegals who have been arrested in Slovenia floating them as possible swap targets, but it's a much tougher situation when other countries are involved. The Americans can't just call up the Germans or Slovenians and say, "Release these guys."

ROBBINS:
Of course there's another American citizen, there are two other American citizens who are being held, one is Paul Whelan. Do the Russians ever do a two-for-one swap? How much does that complicate it?

ELDER:
They do, and they have. They've been reluctant it appears to include Paul Whelan in any swap. He's a former military officer and that probably adds to what they think is the high value of that target, but they have done it in the past. The Americans were not successful in getting Whelan grouped in with Brittney Griner's release, and I'll say that there's more than two Americans being held in Russian prisons right now, there's ten.

There's an officer out in Vladivostok today, also in Yekaterinburg, a Russian woman. She works at a spa in California, went to Yekaterinburg to visit her mom, her trial for treason started. So it's a really dangerous time for Americans to go to Russia, both journalists and not.

ROBBINS:
Of course another American journalist who's being held by the Russians, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty's, Alsu Kurmasheva, who was picked up in October of '23 in Tatarstan. She wasn't even reporting there, she was visiting her mother who is ill, and the charges against her have escalated. It started out with failing to register her U.S. passport, she's a dual national, then it went to failure to register her as a foreign agent, and then now it's allegedly spreading falsehoods about the Russian military. Is there any movement on her case?

ELDER:
The main thing that advocates for Alsu Kurmasheva want, including her family—she has a husband in Prague and two small children—they want the U.S. government to designate her as "wrongfully detained." That's something that has been applied to Evan, it tends to increase the attention on her case. The U.S. government say that they are involved, but the U.S. government has not explained why they haven't given her that designation yet, but they say they continue to advocate for her release. The latest move there is that she had appealed for her detention not to be extended this week, and the Russian court unsurprisingly overturned that.

ROBBINS:
Well, the Journal has done an extraordinary, extraordinary job of keeping Evan very much front and center, and we all should be remembering what's going on with Evan and with Alsu and all the Americans who are being held. I mean, the fact that the Russians are using these extraordinary people as pawns is just utterly unacceptable. So let's hope that they do the right thing and free them, and let's hope that the Biden administration keeps the pressure on, because these people, they really have to come home.

ELDER:
I couldn't agree more. Carla, let's move over to Europe now. So the recent EU parliamentary elections saw a marked shift to the right, most notably in France where President Emmanuel Macron's decision to call snap legislative elections has unleashed a political free-for-all. This week, European Union leaders were expected to quickly decide on who should be appointed to the bloc's top four positions, but that meeting adjourned without an agreement. So Carla, how are the elections results changing politics throughout the region?

ROBBINS:
Perhaps the least significant change was in the EU Parliament where despite the gains by far-right parties, the moderates are going to keep control with 400 of the 720 seats there. The real shock was what you said, was how well the far-right did not only in France, but also in Germany. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally got more than twice the votes of Macron's Renaissance. In Germany, the far-right AfD came in second to the Christian Democrats, while all of Scholz's Social Democrats came in two percentage points behind the AfD. That's after the AfD's lead candidate told the FT and La Repubblica that "not all members of the Nazi SS were necessarily criminals." An extraordinary statement. That statement was so extraordinary that even the far-right Identity and Democracy group in the EU Parliament decided to kick the AfD out of their bloc, but it didn't stop them from coming in second in the parliamentary elections in Germany. So Scholz in pretty much everyone's estimation is now a lame duck, but his coalition is going to hang on and hope to turn things around before the next election in '25.

But in France to the dismay of pretty much everyone in his party, Macron called these snap elections, and the first round is June 30th, so I think we're going to be talking about this next week as well. Macron is a gambler on he may be betting that the EU parliamentary vote was a protest, and that now everybody's gotten it out of their system and they're going to hew back to the center, or he may be betting that if the far-right National Rally takes the majority of seats in the legislature and its new face, who's this twenty-eight-year-old Jordan Bardella becomes prime minister, the government's going to be so paralyzed or so incompetent that when it comes time for presidential elections in '27 and Macron can't run again, that the National Rally and Le Pen will be so completely discredited that they have no future. That to me is like let's-destroy-the-village-to-save-it scenario that I certainly wouldn't risk, but Macron's done it.

The rules for French legislative elections are so complicated that I'm not even going to bother to try to explain them, but the most likely outcome right now is chaos, and the polls have the National Rally far ahead with 37 percent of support. There's a left-wing coalition, 28 percent of Macron's liberals are far, far behind it, 18 percent. So we'll have to watch that space, but it's really shaken everything up in France.

So as you said, in the midst of all of this, several of the EU's current government leaders, Macron and Scholz most vocally, were determined to decide this week on who should get the four top jobs in the EU. This horse-trading usually drags on after an election, but they decided that quick coronations were going to signal that the center is still held, and signal to their own voters, to Putin, and to the U.S. because everyone's sitting around nervously watching our presidential campaign. But when the twenty-seven met on Monday, they couldn't get a deal, apparently because the centrist EPP, and that's the largest bloc in the parliament, got greedy. They didn't just want to get Ursula von der Leyen in for another term as the commission president, and that's the executive branch in the EU, they wanted to share the European Council presidency, and that's the summit group with the Socialists, the second-largest bloc in the parliament, greedy, greedy, greedy.

None of this of course has anything to do with the right-wing surge, which is where we started this conversation, other than the fact that Italy's Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, who is the most powerful right-wing leader in the EU, was completely left out of the horse-trading, and much to her annoyance, and playing into the criticism that Brussels is out of touch with voters' concerns. So the twenty-seven are going to be back to the bargaining table next week, and Meloni is reportedly using this time to maneuver for some second-tier role in her right-wing. So everybody's reeling, and interestingly enough, the centrists who are going to control the parliament seem to be...they're looking at the French and saying, "What's Macron doing?" But it's business as usual when it comes to the politics of the EU.

ELDER:
It's kind of stunning that just a few years after Brexit you have even far-right parties in Europe now angling as being within the European system rather than rejecting it. I've been reading some stuff about Belgium, which sounds like there's a lot of political chaos, as you called it in France, and it seems that the Social Democrats did well in places where they weren't in power and then poorly in places where they were in power. So to what degree are these votes national protest votes, and to what degree are they about what the EU should be for the average citizen?

ROBBINS:
Most of us don't understand what the EU Parliament does here in the United States, and I think a lot of Europeans don't know what the EU Parliament does, so these votes had a lot more to do with how they felt about their sitting government. If you take a place like Hungary, for example, where people really know right-wing nearly autocrats, because Orbán has been in power forever, Orbán's party didn't do well. In fact, for the first time in a really long time, he has got a center-right opposition party that's got nearly a third of the vote, and so he of course is undaunted by this. In fact, next month, Hungary takes over the rotating presidency of the EU, and this week it unveiled the slogan for its tenure, "Make Europe Great Again."

ELDER:
Oh no.

ROBBINS:
They're really paying attention to what's going on here. So a lot of this really is protest vote, but it should not be ignored, not least because it's hugely disrupted the second most powerful country in Europe, France, and because it is saying something. It's saying something about the dismay about what's going on in governments the same way there's dismay in this country.

I wouldn't underplay...if it's not an anti-"Europe vote overtly," because nobody is talking about...including Le Pen's group, they're not talking about pulling out of the EU, but they are talking about changing policy on climate, they're talking about changing policy on Ukraine, they're talking about changing policies on gender rights, changing policy on lots of things that seem very fundamental to Europe. Do they have the power to do it? Not right now in the Parliament, but they're certainly going to be pushing.

ELDER:
It seems like we're getting to a theme this year of elections from what happened in the EU, India, South Africa. We'll see what happens here in November, but a real anti-incumbent kind of vibe.

ROBBINS:
Well, I certainly would like Europe to be, let's make Europe be Europe. I'm a believer in the EU, the Ode to Joy.

Miriam, on June 5th when Boeing's "Calypso" spacecraft headed to the International Space Station with two astronauts aboard, and it was its first manned mission, the plan was they were going to stay for nine days, but after leaks and multiple thruster failures, NASA is now projecting they're going to come back on June 26. Is this just growing pains for this program or one more Boeing mess up, we all know about Boeing, or is it something bigger? Privatizing space launches to the ISS, Elon Musk's SpaceX is the other company fairing astronauts on its Dragon spacecraft, was supposed to encourage innovation and save the government money. Is it doing that?

ELDER:
Oh, where to begin? First, what the heck is Boeing and SpaceX for that matter doing in space? Let's recall that NASA retired its last space shuttle in 2011, that felt like the real end of an era. In the lead up to that, the Senate passed a bill providing $6 billion to NASA over six years to encourage private sector space travel. It eventually awarded multi-billion dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to build the crafts that would replace the retired space shuttles. So enter the Boeing Starliner, which arrived at the ISS with two astronauts on June 6th after two failed launches.

Now as you mentioned, the return to earth has been delayed. So, are these growing pains an issue with Boeing in particular? This might be an easy out, but I think first we have to acknowledge the fact that space travel remains extremely difficult. It's not uncommon to delay reentry. One American astronaut recently spent more than a year on the ISS because of delays. Remember, NASA scrapped its own shuttle program after the Columbia disintegrated on reentry back in 2003, killing all seven people on board, and that came almost twenty years after the Challenger disaster. Both of them served to highlight a decades old problem, which is basically that the shuttle program had been chronically underfunded.

Like you say, privatizing space travel was meant to address that, but it's come with its own challenges. Both SpaceX and Boeing took far longer than expected to launch: both were expected to in 2017, SpaceX went up in 2020, and the Starliner this year. Those delays in turn make the venture more expensive for NASA. Starliner's delays alone cost the agency $1.4 billion.

So, SpaceX and Boeing are mostly in charge of their own oversight here. This is of course coming as Boeing faces immense scrutiny over its civilian aircraft. Earlier this week at a hearing with the company's CEO, David Calhoun, Senator Richard Blumenthal said more than a dozen whistleblowers had come forward with concerns over the company's practices. Boeing is saying that the space program is completely separate. So I think it's a combination: space travel is notoriously difficult, runs over budget, and there are issues. But, Boeing is also probably getting more scrutiny because of the issues it's facing elsewhere.

ROBBINS:
Now SpaceX, which even with its delays still got there a lot faster than Boeing, and the prediction originally was because Boeing, which had been involved in the shuttle program, that Boeing was the one that was going to get there faster. But SpaceX up until now has done far better. They've flown ten or more crewed flights to the ISS successfully, they've had lots of cargo flights. So space is hard, there's no question about it, but they've set a standard.

Then of course after the shuttle, the Russians were flying us up there all the time on their pokey...but they were going up and back. I think as hard as it is, I think the expectation was that this was going to become a milk run. I think that's the other reason why people are suddenly paying attention to this, because it's not as much of a milk run as they expected it to be. So, let's hope they get back safely and let's hope they routinize the whole thing. We're not paying attention to SpaceX, because they seem to have routinized it.

ELDER:
Yes, but we were paying to SpaceX when they had explosions on launch and things like that. I think that these are still new systems and my sense is that yes, there have been delays, but also I would much rather that they take the extra time, fix the issues with the thrusters and with the helium leaks than have a rushed re-entry just to kind of achieve it.

ROBBINS:
Certainly. Well, come home safely "Calypso," and they're called ... I looked up, why do they call it "Calypso"? It's not because of the Calypso and the nymph and Odysseus and all that. It's named after Jacques Cousteau's oceanographic vessel, so there you have it.

ELDER:
Great.

ROBBINS:
I do love it when we find these things out.

ELDER:
All right, Carla, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience selected, "Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet." So, why now? And what could be the impact on the war in Gaza?

ROBBINS:
The war cabinet was set up when centrist opposition leader and former military chief of staff and former defense minister, Benny Gantz, joined the Netanyahu government soon after the October 7th Hamas attack. Gantz, this is part of the price for joining the government, he wanted a small decision-making body to oversee the war, and he wanted to freeze the far-right members of Netanyahu's government out of the process. Netanyahu wanted the credibility, both domestic and international, that Gantz brought by joining the government.

Last week, Gantz, after threatening, giving Netanyahu an ultimatum, quit the government accusing him of failing to come up with a plan to release the hostages, to end the war, to govern Gaza without a prolonged military occupation. With Gantz gone, the cabinet lost all its symbolic value. Netanyahu's decision to disband, it may also have been intended to head off demands from two of his government's most radical right-wing members who wanted in with Gantz gone.

While many analysts have warned, including me, that Gantz's departure would make Bibi more dependent on his far-right partners, interestingly enough that relationship seems particularly neuralgic this week with public battles over whether to consider even a temporary cease-fire, battles over military service requirements for the ultra-Orthodox, who assigns rabbis, and other issues. Wednesday, yesterday, we're taping on Thursday, Netanyahu told his partners to, "Get ahold of themselves and focus on the war," while his Likud party accused one of those members who's been lobbying particularly vocally, Ben-Gvir, of leaking state secrets, and Gavir meanwhile made jokes about Bibi's pacemaker. It's not been a friendly week here.

Israel's generals also increasingly challenging Netanyahu publicly and his military leadership. That's the sort of thing that would make me very nervous in a democracy. Over the weekend, the IDF announced, apparently without consulting Netanyahu, that it would pause operations during daylight hours in parts of the southern Gaza Strip to allow more aid deliveries, which sounds like a very good thing, and then Bibi's people let it be known that he was furious about this. Then in a TV interview this week, the IDF's chief spokesman challenged Netanyahu's repeated promises of, "Absolute victory over Hamas," and said, "The idea that it's possible to destroy Hamas to make Hamas vanish, that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public." Netanyahu immediately snapped back at that.

Cease-fire talks seemed to be going nowhere. Netanyahu's yet to publicly endorse a deal that the U.S. is still describing as originating with the Israelis. There's been violent anti-government demonstrations in the streets, including outside Netanyahu's house, and we've seen the most intense shelling from Lebanon's Hezbollah since the Gaza war began. When a U.S. envoy who's been working to de-escalate tensions with Hezbollah arrived in Jerusalem from Beirut, he devoted part of his meeting with Netanyahu warning him that claims that Bibi made on X this week that the U.S. is holding up arms and ammunition shipments were, "unproductive, and more importantly, completely untrue." The U.S. said that it's only held up one shipment, those two thousand pound bombs that they didn't want used in Rafah.

Has the dissolving the war cabinet changed anything? I don't know how much it restrained the word Gaza in the first place. Certainly I think added to the impression that there was some balance for Netanyahu for domestic and internationally, but I think Netanyahu's problems go far, far, far beyond the war cabinet.

ELDER:
It certainly seems like he's getting it from all sides. From the left, from the right, from the military, elements of the Biden administration, Chuck Schumer. One has to wonder if and when his political career might actually be over or up for a change.

ROBBINS:
That has always been the problem with Netanyahu is that it is really all about his political career, and at this point staying out of court, and this is really a difficult one. Not good for Israel, not good for Palestine, not good for the world, really an especially tough week all around.

ELDER:
Indeed. That is our look at the world next week. Here are some other stories to keep an eye on, not all of them as dark. CNN hosts the first U.S. presidential debate of 2024 between President Biden and former President Trump. England's Glastonbury music festival will feature Dua Lipa, Coldplay, SZA, Janelle Monáe, Burna Boy, and many others. And, the EU begins formal accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page of The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra, and special thanks to Molly McAnany, Kenadee Mangus, Emily Hall Smith for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long, Bob will be back next week. Miriam, thanks again. It's so great to see you.

ELDER:
Oh, such a pleasure, and this is Miriam Elder saying goodbye.