As the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich prepares to spend his 32nd birthday on Thursday in a Moscow lockup, Joe Biden has assured the reporter’s family that the White House will get him back to the US from Russia, the journalist’s sister said. Danielle Gershkovich remarked on Tuesday in an interview on Newsmax that the president “promised our family personally that he’s going to get Evan home”. “His friends and family – we just want him to get back to doing what he loves the most,” Danielle Gershkovich said in reference to her brother’s reporting as she appeared on several cable news networks across the political spectrum. “Evan’s not here yet – the job isn’t done, and we’re waiting to see him home.” Gershkovich in late March became the first American journalist to be held in Russia on spying charges since the end of the cold war. He was at the end of a work trip when he was detained in Ekaterinburg. Russia’s FSB security service has alleged without publishing any evidence that he was collecting state secrets about the country’s military-industrial complex. Gershkovich and the Wall Street Journal have denied the charges, saying he was on a legitimate assignment deserving of the highest free press protections. His editor Paul Beckett accused Russia on Tuesday of taking Gershkovich hostage “to gain leverage with the US government”. “You never, ever want to hear that about one of your colleagues anywhere in the world,” Beckett said on Newsmax. A court in Moscow has ordered Gershkovich to be held in pre-trial detention until 30 November. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted as charged. In a separate interview on MSNBC, Danielle Gershkovich said she was doing everything she could to emotionally support her brother during his time in captivity in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. “We write letters about once a week, and I summarize goings-on with our family – daily life,” Danielle Gershkovich said. “I try to make him smile, so we do a lot of jokes, a lot of sibling kind of jokes.” The US’s Russian ambassador, Lynne Tracy, visited Gershkovich in Lefortovo on 17 October, according to a statement published by her office on X, formerly Twitter. Tracy described Gershkovich as being “in good spirits despite his challenging circumstances”, and she said her embassy continued “to call for his immediate release”. On MSNBC, Beckett alluded to how the US and Russia had each described being serious about the prospect of a prisoner swap. But “we would like to see more action, to be honest,” Beckett said. “We feel that it’s so outrageous that Evan has been jailed on these false charges that I think it’s incumbent on the US government to deal with the Russians in a way that will bring him back to the family and back to the newsroom.” Another high-profile American detainee in Russia, the retired marine Paul Whelan, has been held there nearly five years on espionage charges that the US dismisses as meritless. In an interview published by CNN on Tuesday, Whelan said the US had “painted a target” on his back by leaving him out of its last two prisoner swaps with Russia. A pair of White House-Kremlin prisoner swaps last year got the basketball star Brittney Griner and marine veteran Trevor Reed back to the US in exchange for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout and drug trafficker Konstantin Yaroshenko. Griner had been held after bringing a small amount of cannabis oil into Russia. Reed was charged with violence against a Russian police officer. Danielle Gershkovich held out hope for an outcome like those savored by the loved ones of Griner and Reed. “Every day that he’s imprisoned is a day too long,” she told Newsmax. “Of course we want him home. We want him to be spending his birthday at home.”