When Evan Gershkovich was arrested by the FSB he feared the worst

Yekaterinburg, Russia, 2023. American journalist Evan Gershkovich is sitting in a restaurant talking to a source.

They inform the American that he is being arrested by Russia's main intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

Known as the FSB, it's the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, where Russian President Vladimir Putin previously worked.

Gershkovich is now the first US journalist to be arrested in Russia since the Cold War. He is hooded and thrown in a van before the agents get to work.

"The hood gets ripped off at one point," Gershkovich told 7.30.

"There's operatives sitting next to me and a man across from me in a suit. He asks, 'Who do you work for?' I say the Wall Street Journal.

The question is repeated before Gershkovich arrives at a station and is charged with espionage.

The charge strikes fear into the foreign correspondent. He knows Russia under Putin has a reputation for doing whatever it takes to silence enemies of the state.

In 2018 former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were targeted in an assassination attempt with deadly nerve agent Novichok. They would ultimately survive the poisoning.

Former Putin opponent Alexei Navalny survived an attempt on his life undertaken with Novichok before his eventual death in February 2024, in one of Russia's harshest prisons.

And in August 2023 former Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin perished in a plane crash, while a number of other former allies have disappeared.

Gershkovich told 7.30 that his main fear was torture.

"I've reported on cases where somebody's brought to a station, strapped to a chair, electrodes are attached to various parts of their body, and they're electrocuted, simply for the fact of trying to get them to sign papers that attest to the fact that they're guilty in a fabricated case," he said.

The fear was real but for Gershkovich the torture would not come. The FSB and Russian authorities had something else in mind.

Gershkovich realised he had been set up as Russia looked to replenish its "exchange bank".

That "bank", Gershkovich says, is all about Russia having a number of foreigners it can use in exchange to get some of its own incarcerated back.

In his case, the main target was Russian hitman Vadim Krasikov, who was serving jail time in Germany, having been convicted in 2019 over the brazen daylight murder of a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park in 2018.

The judge called the killing of Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili "state terrorism", adding that the order had almost certainly come from Putin himself.

Among the evidence he cited for Russian state involvement were Krasikov's official Russian papers containing a false identity, and the fact that Russian law empowered Putin to order the murder of state enemies abroad.

Gershkovich said he knew almost immediately prisoner exchange would be the case once he had arrived in his "really tiny" prison cell that measured 2.4 metres by 3 metres by 3.7 metres.

"It has a bed running on one wall, a bed at the end perpendicular at the window, a desk running down the other, and it's so thin that only one person can fit walking up and down that space, and you eventually have a cellmate," he told 7.30.

"So there are two of you living in the cell, and you can only walk up and down six or seven steps.

"On my second night in prison on TV, I'm watching the main evening news show and one of the hosts says to the other host 'we've replenished our exchange fund'.

"The Russians use that as a catch-all for the foreigners that they hold to be swapped."

Gershkovich says he was treated relatively well compared to other prisoners he knew about.

"I've been reporting obviously on stories of Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian POWs, Russian political prisoners," he said.

"[They] were tortured, deprived of hot food, hot showers, told they're never gonna see their families again, that's not happening to me.

"Really early on, my mattress is thicker than my cellmates. Before the US ambassador comes to visit, the prison warden comes and checks in on me, asks how I'm doing.

"Eventually, there's even a moment where I say 'I'm surprised how much you're checking in on me'. He says, 'of course, we care about your health'.

While it had become clear to Gershkovich that he was waiting for a swap, the death of Navalny was a blow and he remembers it as a moment that was likely intended to strike fear.

He heard the news while he was on his one hour a day on the jail's roof, his only time outside the tiny cell.

"We're on this walk and suddenly the radio, which never happens, switches to the news and we hear that Alexei Navalny has died, and then it switches back," he said.

"I think they did that for the Ukrainians who were being held in the prison, the Russian political prisoners, perhaps myself too, very deliberately to send a message to us."

Before his death, there had been reports Navalny could form part of a prisoner swap deal in exchange for Russian assassin Krasikov.

But six months later, the swap happened in Türkiye, and the journalist was released alongside fellow Americans Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva.

Gershkovich used his 16 months in prison to learn more about Putin's Russia and what people really thought of a leader he says was growing more authoritarian while the war in Ukraine rolled on.

"When Putin came to power it coincided with this big oil and gas boom," Gershkovich said of his May 2000 inauguration as president for the first time.

"At the same time, he made really clear what would happen politically if you tried to challenge him.

"The social contract that was essentially developed was your life will get better, money is pouring in as long as you stay out of politics.

"That is essentially the logic of the regime over the next 20, 25 years, except that it gets more and more repressive.

"By the time I go to prison, what I, and I think the best sociologists and researchers working on Russia will tell you, is that 15 per cent of people really support Putin in the war, 15 per cent really are anti-Putin and anti-war."

He said the rest would abstain from making any comment on the war, such is the fear Putin wields on either side of the prison walls.

Gershkovich said one prison guard perfectly encapsulated the example, telling him "the news is so bad, I try not to follow it. I go to my dacha, my country house, I fish".

"So I asked him what he thought about the war," Gershkovich said.

"He smiled and zippered his mouth shut, put a finger to his mouth and kind of shrugged his shoulders. And what he was telling me is, I think, 'I don't support the war, but I can't talk about it'.

Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV