Gershkovich, Griner, Gilman: How Americans became bargaining chips in global power struggles
Even as the number of documented cases appears to be slowing as deals are struck, hostage-taking remains a viable tool for statecraft, experts say.
Evan Gershkovich, Brittney Griner, Paul Whelan — and now Robert Gilman.
At one point or another over the last decade, these Americans have spent time behind bars in Russia, with Gilman, an ex-marine who was released last week, being the latest high-profile example of what some call wrongful detention, others hostage-taking.
“In the last five years or so, there have been multiple instances in multiple countries of U.S. citizens being detained and there being a process by which they were designated as wrongfully detained,” said Alexandra (Xander) Meise, an expert in international law who taught at Northeastern’s School of Law, adding that the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs has gotten involved in a number of those cases.
Historically a tactic used by militant groups and non-state actors, hostage-taking remains a viable tool for statecraft for authoritarian regimes seeking leverage amid what some observers have called of a return to great power competition, according to Meise.
“When you look at instances of wrongful detention or hostage-taking, you often see asymmetric power positions between the countries involved,” she said.
International law prohibits hostage-taking through several overlapping bodies of law, said Zinaida Miller, a professor of law and international affairs at Northeastern. International human rights law prohibits both “arbitrary detention and torture,” while international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, bars hostage-taking in armed conflict, treating the practice as a potential war crime.
Then there is the 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, a U.N. treaty that requires states parties to criminalize hostage-taking and prosecute or extradite alleged offenders, Miller said.
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But detaining foreign citizens can provide strongmen with bargaining power in the arena of geopolitics and a way to spread narratives about foreign threats — real or imagined. It’s been used by governments operating under the cover of domestic law enforcement, Meise said.
Authoritarian regimes atop governments with weaker rule-of-law protections often use the detention of foreigners as leverage because they know that democratic governments are less likely to retaliate by arbitrarily detaining their own citizens, she said.
The U.S. State Department monitors and reviews potential cases of wrongful detention consistent with the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which became law in December 2020. The White House said earlier this year that it had secured the release of 101 detained Americans abroad. It declared March 9, 2026 “U.S. Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Day.”
Hostage-taking, according to the State Department, which it distinguishes from wrongful detention, is the “unlawful abduction or holding of a U.S. national against their will by a non-state actor in order to compel a third person or governmental organization to do or abstain from doing any act as a condition for the release of the person detained.”
Since 2012, there has been a “significant increase” in the number of U.S. nationals wrongfully detained abroad, according to a foundation report, but that number has been declining since about 2022 — largely as a result of successful campaigns and negotiations that resulted in releases.
The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization advocating for Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad and named after an American journalist abducted and killed in Syria, currently tracks 38 publicly disclosed hostage and wrongful detention cases involving U.S. nationals in at least 11 countries. The foundation’s own criteria for determining whether a case rises to the level of wrongful detention are drawn from the 2020 law.
In states with “extremely Byzantine and harsh” criminal legal systems, where laws are applied more discretionarily, it is also possible more people are swept up in the dragnet — including foreign nationals, Miller said.
According to groups such as Freedom House, which documents weak judicial independence and routine violations of due process, and Human Rights Watch, which has documented arbitrary detention, unfair trials and other abuses by government authorities, Russia, China and Iran all score substantially lower than the U.S. and other democracies, on measures of the rule of law, including constraints on government power, fundamental rights and criminal justice.
“That is going to be true on a day-to-day basis for everybody living under those regimes, and it is an added element for anyone entering those states,” Miller said.
At the same time, those governments often use wrongful detentions to advance narratives aimed at their own citizenry about those detainees and their countries of origin, depicting them as spies or threats, which in turn can be used as justification for government actions, she said.
That is how Russia has justified the detention of some American citizens. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, for example, was arrested and convicted on a charge of espionage that he, The Journal and the U.S. government vehemently denied Former Marine Paul Whelan was also convicted of espionage. The U.S. government deemed Gershkovich and Whelan, both freed in an August 2024 mass prisoner swap, to have been wrongfully detained.
In the case of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was detained less than a week before Russia invaded Ukraine and subsequently convicted of bringing marijuana with criminal intent into Russia, Meise said Moscow initially justified her detention under its domestic criminal law, but the circumstances of her imprisonment, sentencing and treatment ultimately led the U.S. to designate her as wrongfully detained. She was released in December 2022 in exchange for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was imprisoned in the U.S.
Iran has also used the detention of Americans and other foreign nationals both as diplomatic leverage and to reinforce domestic narratives about the threat posed by the U.S. and the West, Meise said.
There are several ongoing cases of what the U.S. State Department considers wrongful detention, including Reza Valizadeh, a 49-year-old Iranian-American journalist who was arrested in Sept. 2024, and Kamran Hekmati, a 61-year-old Jewish Iranian-American detained in 2025.
“Historically, the country where we see the most instances of wrongful detention and or hostage-taking by an adversary would be Iran,” she said. “And interestingly, we haven’t heard much about, at least, new cases.”
Disclosure: NGN Executive Editor Ann M. Simmons was The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau chief when reporter Evan Gershkovich was wrongfully detained in Russia.
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