Gershkovich, other prisoners freed from Russia are on road to recovery: ‘Just starting to taste freedom’

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and other Americans are home, but returning to U.S. soil is just one step on the road to recovery .

Gershkovich, Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva triumphantly landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Thursday night, where they met with President Biden and Vice President Harris, along with family members awaiting them on the tarmac. They returned home through a historic, multi-country prisoner swap after being wrongfully detained by Russia. 

WSJ editor Paul Beckett, who was the Washington bureau chief before shifting positions to focus on bringing Gershkovich home, said the trio of Americans were then taken to San Antonio, where the State Department runs a program to help people who have been in isolation get reacquainted with civilian life.  

"That process is underway, so [they’re] just starting to taste freedom," Beckett told Fox News Digital. 

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Evan Gershkovich, followed by his mother Ella Milman, smiles as he arrives at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on August 1, 2024.  (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

"From Evan’s family, who’ve been with him this whole time, we know that he’s doing fine. You know, the same fortitude, presence of mind that he displayed for 16 months when we were able to see him in those glass cages has been replicated," Beckett continued. "He seems to be in a good place trying to figure out what’s next, but it’s given us no reason to worry whatsoever." 

Beckett said the Wall Street Journal wants Gershkovich to take his time before deciding his next steps, and that research has shown giving him space and flexibility is critical. 

"Obviously, you want to spend time with family, spend time with friends and reconnect," Beckett said. "It needs to be a gradual process." 

Beckett noted that Gershkovich, who requested an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin while he was still held captive, kept writing throughout the time he was wrongfully detained.

"Obviously, he came out with a million stories, it’ll just be up to him on how he wants to tell them," Beckett said. 

Before receiving a 16-year sentence last month in a Russian penal colony on dubious spying charges, Gershkovich languished for over a year in Moscow's Lefortovo prison. Notorious as a site of tortures and executions under the Soviet Union, it was specifically designed to make inmates feel abandoned and psychologically isolated. Yet Gershkovich retained a sense of humor about his grim circumstances; at one point he wrote a friend, "Hello from sunny Moscow!"

"Lefortovo is a very unique prison in Russia's extensive system of prisons," Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov told Fox News Digital. "In Lefortovo, people are held completely incommunicado. There is no way to corrupt FSB guards. Just absolutely impossible. A special procedure was developed many, many years ago to make sure that prisoners do not see each other… They have just one hour to exercise in a small courtyard, and it's completely covered from all sides, so you cannot see anything outside."

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Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan, who were detained in Russia, pose with a U.S. flag as they celebrate their freedom in this undated handout photograph obtained on August 1, 2024.  (U.S. Government/Handout via REUTERS)

Liz Cathcart is the executive director of Hostage US, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping "American hostages, wrongful detainees and their families get the support and guidance they need to survive the challenge of a kidnapping." 

Cathcart said the return home can be "extremely overwhelming," particularly for a high-profile group that was greeted by President Biden.

"It’s such a happy moment, it’s extremely overwhelming but in the best of ways on those first early hours," Cathcart told Fox News Digital. 

She said that the stay in San Antonio can take anywhere from days to weeks.

"It is a full physical and mental health evaluation with debriefs and things like that. That's a really valuable step, of course, because it provides sort of an interim between being held and, sort of, getting back to what life is going to look like," Cathcart said. 

"Oftentimes, once people are back and the dust settles a little bit, that is where the really hard work of reintegration comes into place," she continued. "That manifests in a couple of ways, first and foremost is physical health." 

Cathcart explained that many people who were wrongfully detained come back malnourished. 

"If you aren't being fed consistently, or appropriate types of food and variety and things like that, then your body starts to break down from malnutrition, and then you start to see problems with muscle wastage," she said.

WSJ REPORTER EVAN GERSHKOVICH RELEASED BY RUSSIA IN PRISONER SWAP; PAUL WHELAN ALSO BEING FREED

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Cathcart said that being confined to a cell also takes a toll on the body, and oftentimes people return home and think they’re OK but end up realizing their muscles deteriorated and find it difficult to complete normal basic tasks. Others come back with vitamin deficiencies that can make it difficult to resume a normal life. 

Once the freed hostages are deemed physically healthy, mental health becomes the top priority. 

"We see a wide variety of impacts from this type of trauma, being held, on the mental state," Cathcart said. 

"Anything from stress, just normal kind of day-to-day stress and anxiety, all the way through to PTSD," she continued. "By no means does everyone that we work with end up with, or have, PTSD. It's really a wide spectrum that we see." 

Cathcart said that there are countless other challenges, such as dealing with bills that piled up while people were in captivity and figuring out if it’s realistic to resume their pre-detention career. 

The Washington Post's Jason Rezaian, who was held by Iran from 2014 to 2016, wrote last week that the returning prisoners should get whatever help they need to assimilate back into their lives. He recounted some of the domestic difficulties he faced after his lengthy absence, such as credit problems, as well as mental ones like nightmares from his imprisonment.

"Having been cut off from society for months or years, the returning hostages will face difficulty returning to ordinary life," he warned. "When I returned home from Iran in 2016 after being imprisoned for nearly a year and a half, I found that the IRS had charged me with thousands of dollars in penalties for not filing my taxes on time. The usual penalties had compounded."

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Fox News Digital's David Rutz contributed to this report.