Russia isn’t prosecuting U.S. journalists. It’s taking them hostage.

The regime of President Vladimir Putin convicted Mr. Gershkovich, who is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, of espionage. A court in Yekaterinburg sentenced him to 16 years in prison. On the same day Mr. Gershkovich received his verdict, July 19, a court in Kazan found Ms. Kurmasheva, an editor for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, guilty of insulting the Russian army. Her sentence, which wasn’t disclosed until Monday: six and a half years.

These two journalists and their respective news organizations have strongly denied the charges. Mr. Gershkovich, 32, received his final sentence having already spent 478 days in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, a notorious KGB jail. His detention began last year when the Federal Security Service, or FSB, arrested him during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg. In June, prosecutors indicted him, falsely alleging that he was gathering information about a Russian defense contractor on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. The truth, as the Journal has insisted, is that Mr. Gershkovich carried Russian-issued press credentials and had traveled to Yekaterinburg for the sole purpose of reporting.

Ms. Kurmasheva, 47, is an editor for the Tatar-Bashkir language service of RFE/RL, a media corporation funded by the U.S. government. Based in Prague, Ms. Kurmasheva was not even reporting in Russia but visiting her ailing elderly mother there when officials stopped her at Kazan International Airport last June. They confiscated her U.S. and Russian passports and fined her for failing to register her U.S. passport. She was still waiting to get her passports back in October when Russian authorities arrested her on new charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military. “Spreading false information” about the military, is one of the new crimes Mr. Putin has invented to control public opinion since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russians have leveled the charge against Ms. Kurmasheva, her husband, Pavel Butorin, has said, because RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir service released a book in 2022 titled “No to War.” It is a collection of short articles about Russians who oppose the war.

Valid as the denials from the two journalists and their employers are, in a deeper sense they are not necessary. The accusations against Mr. Gershkovich and Ms. Kurmasheva are both false on their own terms and based on provisions of Russian law that lack elementary democratic legitimacy. In a normal country, their activities wouldn’t even be crimes, let alone result in such draconian sentences.

And though the prosecutions do send a chilling message about freedom of expression in Russia, we suspect that is not the main signal Mr. Putin wants to send. Rather, he is engaged in outright hostage-taking, with an eye toward trading these innocent U.S. citizens for actually guilty Russians held in the West. This is what he did in the case of U.S. women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, whom Russia imprisoned on a dubious drug charge then swapped for a duly convicted Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, held in the United States.

The conclusion of bogus proceedings against Mr. Gershkovich and Ms. Kurmasheva could be a sign that the Kremlin is putting the finishing touches on its preparations to trade them, possibly along with at least one other American, Paul Whelan, for a Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov. Mr. Krasikov is serving a life term in Germany, having been convicted in open court of a brazen daylight assassination of a rebel Chechen militia commander in a Berlin park.

The State Department designated Mr. Gershkovich and Mr. Whelan as wrongfully detained, a status that elevates their cases as a matter of official U.S. interest. It should do the same for Ms. Kurmasheva, and for Post Opinions contributor and Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. The latter, though a Russian citizen, is a U.S. legal permanent resident. He is serving 25 years for “treason” — speaking out against Mr. Putin’s war.

All of the above should be released immediately. Journalism — asking questions, gathering facts, holding officials to account — is essential democratic work, not a crime.