MOSCOW — The espionage trial in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will begin June 26 behind closed doors, a statement from the court that will hear the case said Monday.

Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

The trial is to be in Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 870 miles to the west.

The court said the trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him. The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and Washington designated him as wrongfully detained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service says Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich’s release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 60 miles north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskikh appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to Russia’s capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting that he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be Vadim Krasikov, who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly repressive laws on freedom of speech after sending troops into Ukraine.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a reporter for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, has been jailed since October, awaiting trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military.

Gershkovich, the son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper; he was hired by the Journal in 2022.

Separately, U.S. Army soldier Gordon Black is on trial in Vladivostok on charges of theft and threatening murder in a dispute with a Russian woman. Black told a court Monday that he denied the allegation of threatening murder but “partially” admitted to theft, according to reports.