For Americans freed from Russia, the path to recovery starts in Texas

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other U.S. residents freed from Russian are starting on the road to recovery at a Texas military hospital.

On their first full day of freedom Friday, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other U.S. residents released from Russian captivity began heading down the same road to recovery that an American who survived six years in a miserable Venezuelan prison took two years earlier.

José Pereira was one of what became known as the “Citgo 6,” a group of oil executives who were jailed in 2017 by Venezuela on trumped-up embezzlement charges. They spent six years behind bars until they were freed in 2022 in another prisoner exchange engineered by the Biden administration.

And like the newly sprung Americans, Pereira’s first stop back in the U.S. was the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Pereira and four of the five Citgo colleagues he’d been imprisoned with took part in a program called PISA, which stands for post-isolation support activities and was designed by the military to help survivors readjust to regular life.

This undated file photo posted on Twitter on June 18, 2020, by Venezuela's Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza shows Citgo oil executives, from left, Jose Angel Pereira, Gustavo Cardenas, Jorge Toledo, Jose Luis Zambrano, Tomeu Vadell and Alirio Jose Zambrano, outside the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service in Caracas, Venezuela.Jorge Arreaza/Venezuela's Foreign Ministry via AP fileIn an interview Friday with NBC News, Pereira talked about the 10-day “decompression program” that Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva have been offered to get readjusted to “normal life” and learn how to deal with the trauma they endured. The fourth former captive, Vladimir Kara-Murza, elected to go to Germany.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americans-freed-russia-path-recovery-starts-texas-rcna164943

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