Reintroducing Pablo

How a GRU spy infiltrated the Russian opposition, wound up in a Polish prison, and returned to Moscow in a historic prisoner swap

Of the spies returned to Russia as part of this month’s historic prisoner swap, Pavel Rubtsov was perhaps the most talented. A dual Spanish and Russian national who also went by Pablo González, the 42-year-old spent years working undercover as a journalist and managed to gain access to prominent figures in the Russian opposition — including two of the political prisoners freed as part of the exchange, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova tells the story of how a GRU spy infiltrated the Russian opposition, wound up in a Polish prison, and returned to Moscow.

‘He preferred the dark side’

Pablo González, aka Pavel Rubtsov, arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport on August 1, together with seven other Russian citizens Western countries had released as part of an unprecedented prisoner exchange. Wearing a Star Wars T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Your Empire Needs You,” the 42-year-old disembarked from the plane and smiled as he shook hands with Vladimir Putin, who had literally rolled out the red carpet for the occasion.

Unlike the other returned Russians, González didn’t try to seize the moment and say a few words to the president. He had just been released from Poland, where intelligence agents arrested him in a border town on February 28, 2022, the fourth day of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Accused of working as an agent for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, González spent more than two years in solitary confinement. But all the while he maintained that he wasn’t a spy, claiming that he had been filming a report about Ukrainian refugees for the Spanish press.

Among journalists in Madrid, European think tankers, and members of the Russian opposition, González was known not as one of the Kremlin’s “illegals” but as a Spanish journalist and political analyst. Indeed, his story was much stronger than those of the other compromised deep-cover spies returned in the swap.

González-Rubtsov didn’t have to pretend to be Spanish — he was actually born into a family of immigrants from Spain. His grandfather, Andrés González Yagüe, was evacuated to the USSR as a child during the Spanish Civil War. Yagüe’s daughter, María Elena González, would go on to marry Soviet scientist Aleksey Rubtsov. Their son, Pavel Rubtsov, was born in Moscow in 1982.

“Such families were always in the sights of Soviet and Russian intelligence,” said investigative journalist Irina Borogan, who specializes in covering the Russian spy services. “By virtue of their origins, they speak languages and have relatives abroad, and are therefore perfectly suited for recruitment.”

After her divorce from Andrés and the fall of the Berlin Wall, María moved to Spain with her son and changed his legal name to Pablo González Yagüe. González-Rubtsov would later hide the fact that he had gone by two names since childhood. He obtained a Russian passport in 2016 but kept this a secret, too, though he paid regular visits to his father in Moscow.

Meduza interviewed several of González’s acquaintances, none of whom suspected a thing. Following his arrest, both his Spanish colleagues and the mother of his three children, Oihana Goiriena, insisted that he was innocent. Even rights organizations like Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders spoke out on his behalf, calling on Warsaw to conduct a fair trial.

The Polish authorities accused González of espionage and placed him in pre-trial detention. According to officials in Warsaw, González used his “status as a journalist” to travel to “areas with military conflicts” and “political tensions.” “There were no holes in his cover story: a bilingual who grew up in Russia and moved to Spain. Such a person can’t fail because he doesn’t need to study the Spanish language and Basque cuisine — he knows about them already,” Borogan explained.

González hasn’t made any public statements since returning to Russia. He also didn’t respond to an interview request Meduza made through his father.

González’s reputation as a journalist and connections in Russian opposition circles allowed him to get close to at least two of the political prisoners who ended up on the opposite side of the exchange: Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza. As one of his acquaintances put it, González “preferred the dark side of the force” — so much so that he had Darth Vader tattooed on his shin.

‘A single man always provokes suspicion’

Pablo González studied journalism and completed a master’s degree in Slavic languages in Barcelona. Years later, he would use his degree to explain his flawless Russian to his friends from the anti-Putin opposition.

Positioning himself as an expert on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, González built his career as a journalist covering the conflicts and breakaway regions that emerged after Communism’s collapse, from Transnistria and Kosovo to Nagorno-Karabakh and the “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine. He eventually launched his own media outlet, Eulixe, which shut down shortly after his arrest.

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In all likelihood, Eulixe folded because its funding ran dry. According to Polish intelligence, reports found on González’s devices revealed that he had asked his handlers to fund a media outlet. A source close to the investigation told Meduza that this was a “site he had created, which ‘reflected the correct information’” — in other words, Kremlin narratives. On one occasion, for example, Eulixe published an article about a press conference put on by Bonanza Media — a GRU-controlled website that worked to whitewash Russia’s role in the downing of Flight MH17.

González also positioned himself as a political analyst, using his “expertise” on post-Soviet countries and the Balkan region to work his way into expert circles in Madrid. He also managed to infiltrate the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), where he was accredited as a journalist.

After moving to Warsaw in 2019, González befriended many of the foreign correspondents based there. And despite being legally married in Spain, he started dating a local woman named Magda. “They met at some event in Nagorno-Karabakh,” journalist Evgeny Buntman told Meduza.

González sent his handlers a detailed dossier on his new girlfriend. “Using women is a standard tactic for Russian ‘illegals,’” said Borogan. “A single man always provokes suspicion but with a local woman you blend in everywhere. ‘Who’s that suspicious guy? He’s Magda’s boyfriend!’” Borogan admitted that even she didn’t suspect González was a spy. “I must confess that he won my trust instantly, because he acted absolutely naturally, like a war reporter,” she recalled.

Borogan met González in Prague in 2018, when they both lectured at the Boris Nemtsov Foundation’s Summer School of Journalism. (Borogan and her co-author, Andrey Soldatov, gave a lecture on covering espionage cases, González — about war reporting.) “He joked a lot and didn’t ask any leading questions,” Borogan told Meduza. His political stance also seemed to align with the Russian opposition, she added. “He expressed complete sympathy with the Ukrainian side and didn’t support the [Russian-backed] separatists [in Donbas].”

In conversations with other participants, however, González was a little less restrained, emphasizing that he was from the “free Basque country,” which waged its own battle for independence, and saying that he “understands the people of Donbas who want self-determination.”

González had infiltrated the Boris Nemtsov Foundation back in 2016, thanks to his PACE accreditation. “At the time, the foundation had organized an event on the sidelines of the Council of Europe, calling for the appointment of a PACE special rapporteur on the Boris Nemtsov murder case,” a source close to the organization told Meduza. “And Pablo just walked up and, in very good Russian, asked Zhanna [Nemtsova] for an interview.”

The Boris Nemtsov Foundation added González to its events mailing list. And as a result, in the years that followed, he gained access to opposition politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, and prominent lawyers Ilya Novikov and Vadim Prokhorov. He even managed to copy Boris Nemtsov’s letters from his daughter’s laptop. (Zhanna Nemtsova did not reply to Meduza’s questions.)

González maintained contact with all of his interview subjects, sending them messages on social media and commenting on their Instagram posts. He reached out to Borogan and Soldatov on Facebook to get permission to reprint their articles. Writer Alisa Ganieva said that a year after she met González at a Nemtsov Foundation event in Berlin, he continued to correspond with her “about Dagestan and the Caucasus — the mood, religion, whether there are separatist sentiments, and the attitude towards [MMA] fighter Khabib [Nurmagomedov].”

González found common ground with Ilya Yashin through soccer. “You’ll laugh, but a couple years ago this GRU agent and I ended up in Madrid at the same time and had a great time at an Atlético match,” the opposition politician said after his release from prison.

‘I had a spy in my inner circle’

Members of the Russian opposition found González “outgoing, pleasant, and witty.” But all the while, he was writing detailed reports about his friends and acquaintances, compiling information for his handler on everyone from prominent opposition figures to ordinary participants in the Nemtsov Foundation’s summer school. (González suspected one person of working for the CIA.)

At a certain point, González started “hanging out” with his students and “drinking heavily,” the source close to the foundation recalled. The young journalist and the school’s volunteers remembered him as “a muscular bald guy with a beard” who sometimes exuded “too much charisma.”

“He was also a photographer; he took pictures of the entire team,” one volunteer told Meduza. “Now it’s clear where all these photos went. I had a spy in my close circle of friends. Of course, this isn’t an achievement you want to have.”

As the investigative outlet Agentstvo revealed, González’s reports generally consisted of three parts: descriptions of his contacts, cost assessments (accompanied by requests for compensation), and outlines of his future plans. For example, he mentioned a planned meeting with Vladimir Kara-Murza (González interviewed Kara-Murza in September 2017, after the opposition politician’s second poisoning).

In an attempt to show his handlers he had gained exclusive access to Russian opposition figures, González wrote about his efforts to establish contact in great detail and included lengthy observations about his subjects. “The reports he wrote about me were more like an attempt to establish my psychological portrait,” Yashin said in a YouTube broadcast.

However, these reports don’t seem to contain any information that would be useful to Russian intelligence. González had gained access to the “opposition crowd,” but didn’t understand its structure or the importance of certain people who weren’t very well-known publicly. “He clearly didn’t understand what was going on,” one acquaintance told Meduza.

Yashin also believes that González did “zero damage,” describing him as “a caricature of a spy.” But Borogan and Soldatov think that González’s work gathering information about “Putin’s opponents, who were later poisoned and thrown in prison” was actually useful to the Kremlin. And they also find it worrisome that the González-Rubtsov case proved that Russia’s “extremely aggressive” military intelligence agency now has its sights set on the opposition.

“One of the missions of an ‘illegal’ like González is to identify people who can subsequently be recruited — and to find out about their personal lives,” Soldatov explained. “They don’t recruit on the basis of views [or] by saying, ‘You support Navalny, do you want to work for Putin?’ They approach you when they find out your mother is sick and you need help dealing with the hospital.”

* * *

González returned to Ukraine shortly before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. On February 6, 2022, he was preparing to film a live television hit in front of an army checkpoint near Avdiivka when Ukrainian soldiers asked to see his documents. Two hours later, he received a call from the Ukrainian Security Services summoning him to Kyiv for questioning. Afterwards, he told his friend and colleague Juan Teixeira that the SBU agents thought he was a spy.

González left for Spain after Spanish intelligence agents paid visits to his wife, his mother, and one of his friends. According to Teixeira, Spanish agents later asked him: “Did you know there was a Russian spy in your house?”

Following his arrest at a hotel in the Polish border town Przemyśl on February 28, 2022, González called his wife and told her to notify his lawyer. His attorney, Gonzalo Boye, also represents fugitive former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, who is under investigation for his alleged Kremlin ties. Boye has also been implicated in talks with the leader of a Russian criminal syndicate aimed at secretly channeling funds to Catalan separatists.

In an interview with RT, Boye complained that Spanish intelligence was cooperating with Polish investigators instead of trying to get González out of jail. According to the lawyer, only Russia was helping his client. He also maintained that González had been arrested “by mistake.”

González, meanwhile, was spending 23 hours a day under constant video surveillance in a windowless prison cell; he was strip searched multiple times daily. His supporters in Spain started referring to the Polish prison where he was held as the “European Guantanamo.”

In a VKontakte post, González’s father wrote that the only “grounds” for his son’s detention was “a debit card under a third name — my name, Alexey Rubtsov; I gave it to him.” In a report to his handlers, González wrote that as a precaution, he would only use bank accounts and cards issued to his relatives. Rubtsov Senior sent his son 350 euros every month — and Polish intelligence considered this evidence that González was a Russian agent. His wife claimed that her father-in-law was simply supplementing his son’s unstable income from freelance journalism work.

On the day of the prisoner exchange, Alexey wrote on VKontakte, “My son is flying home.” He didn’t reply when Meduza’s correspondent asked whether he knew about his son’s espionage career.

Update: Polish prosecutors issued an indictment for espionage against Pavel González on August 14. They also confirmed that a woman identified as Magdalena Ch. faces separate proceedings for collaborating with González. In an earlier report, the investigative outlet VSquare identified González’s Polish girlfriend as a journalist.

Story by Lilia Yapparova with additional reporting by Alexandra Amelina

Abridged translation by Eilish Hart