On February 28, 2022, the fifth day of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Pablo González was arrested in a small Polish town near the border with Ukraine. Warsaw suspected that the detainee, who worked as a journalist for several Spanish media outlets, was a Kremlin spy. The Polish secret services, working in collaboration with other Western agencies, had been on his trail for some time, two intelligence sources told EL PAÍS. Pablo González, or Pavel Rubtsov, the name he was given at birth 42 years ago in Moscow and the name that appears on his Russian passport, has spent two years and five months in a Polish prison accused of espionage. On Thursday he was part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the Cold War and was sent to Moscow with a group of fraudsters and spies.
His family in Spain, where he has a wife and three children, denies that he is a Russian agent. They say that he took part in the exchange – in which the Kremlin sent Americans and Germans, but also Russian oppositionists – because the Spanish authorities left him “stranded”, while Russia, on the other hand, did act. “Pablo’s father [González] “We have been asking the Russian government for some time to get involved,” says one of his lawyers, Gonzalo Boye, who is also a lawyer for the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont. No trial has been held in Poland.
“I want to thank you for being faithful to your oath, to your duty and to your country, which has not forgotten you,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin to the group of returned Russians, which included the Spanish-Russian. Shortly before, in an unusual event, he had received them with honors at Vnukovo airport, where he shook hands with González and other returnees, and embraced Vadim Krasikov, a spy-hitman sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for murdering a prominent Chechen separatist and refugee.
González (or Rubtsov), with a shaved head and very thick eyebrows, is the grandson of a child of war A Spaniard who was welcomed in Russia during the Civil War, he was born and lived in the Eurasian country during his childhood, but returned to Spain with his mother when he was nine years old, when his parents separated. His father remained in Moscow.
On Friday, the Kremlin provided details of the players in the historic US-led exchange, which has seen Moscow free 16 detainees and receive eight Russian prisoners from several Western countries, including Slovenia and Poland, which have collaborated with Washington, its NATO ally, to push through the deal.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged that Krasikov is a spy and part of an elite unit of the FSB (the heir to the KGB) and that there are other agents among the returnees. One of them is from the military intelligence service (GRU). “The Americans tried to influence this GRU employee who was detained, they found here [en Moscú] “The father of this employee. A phone call was arranged with him. During this call, the father, contrary to what was expected of him, told his son that he was doing everything right,” Peskov said, without giving further details or revealing which exchanged prisoner he was referring to.
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Poland has declared the case against González secret for national security reasons and his lawyers are at odds over the charges against him. Bartosz Rogada, the Polish lawyer who assisted him during the first part of his detention, said in February 2023 that he was aware of the “specific accusations” against González but could not reveal them because the case had been declared secret, as he said in an interview with Eitb. Boye, a highly publicised lawyer, says that in the two years and five months he has been detained – most of it in a maximum security area with minimal access to the outdoors – Poland has not brought “formal charges” and criticises the EU country’s treatment of his client. He was accused of “participation in the activities of a foreign intelligence service” (a crime that carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years), according to the Polish internal security service.
Polish intelligence believes that González was scouting possible arms supply routes to Ukraine when he was arrested in Przemysl, a European intelligence source said, a key element to complement the information available by satellite. In July 2022, the head of the British foreign secret service (MI6), Richard Moore, referred to the Spanish-Russian in a conference as one of the “illegal” Russian spies (people with deep cover) who had been operating in Europe for some time and assured that when he was arrested, González was preparing to enter Ukraine, which was already at war, to take part in the “destabilising efforts” from there.
European intelligence sources consulted by this newspaper indicate that González was a GRU agent or an agent of the foreign intelligence service (SVR). The CNI was also always convinced that he worked for Russia, which would corroborate the fact that Moscow has included him in its quota of exchangeable prisoners and that he was received, along with the other released Russians, by Putin, according to intelligence sources.
kyiv’s secret services had already detected him in early February 2022, in the days before the large-scale invasion, when he was filming in the Donbass region (eastern Ukraine) for his work for several media outlets, without the journalist accreditation required for the war zone since 2014; they interrogated him, cloned his mobile phone (according to his own testimony) and urged him to leave the country.
Russian independent newspapers The Insider either Agentsvowho have good intelligence sources, have published several investigations into González. In one of them, Agentsvo identifies Gonzalez as the person who traveled by plane from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 2017 with uncovered GRU agent Sergei Turbin. Both plane tickets were purchased in a single purchase, according to the military intelligence agency’s standard procedure.
Reports on their encounters
In addition, the investigative articles say, the secret services found on his electronic devices reports about his meetings with Russian oppositionists, participants in dissident events and journalists, as well as a detailed list of his expenses and his estimates of them.
There were many reports about the Boris Nemtsov Foundation, the Russian opposition figure who was shot dead in Moscow in 2015, and the summer courses it organised, with participants from all over the world. Agentsvo The report cites two intelligence sources who say that Gonzalez had a relationship with one of Nemtsov’s daughters, Zhanna Nemtsova, and used the link to copy private information from her computer. Nemtsova has refused to discuss the case and says she has signed an agreement with Poland to remain silent.
González allegedly also prepared reports on meetings held in Spain, such as the one held in Madrid in April 2016, where he met the prominent Russian opposition figure Ilia Yashin, who was wanted in Russia, with several open cases and was finally sentenced in 2022 to eight and a half years in prison for criticising Russia’s war against Ukraine. Eight years later, last Thursday, both took part in the historic exchange: Yashin, together with other dissidents and as a political prisoner, travelled from Russia to Germany; González arrived in Moscow accompanied by a group of spies and smugglers.
Boye, his lawyer, who criticises the conditions of his detention and the fact that Poland has never taken the case to court, claims that the reports cited by the intelligence services are nothing more than “his reports for the Spanish media”.
The Spanish government has declined to comment on the release of González, but its official position in this case has differed from that it has maintained with other Spanish prisoners abroad. Thus, the head of Spanish diplomacy, José Manuel Albares, defended the innocence and called for the immediate release of Santiago Sánchez Cogedor and Ana Baneira Suárez, detained in Iran in the midst of protests over the death of the young Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing the veil according to Iranian rules. On the other hand, in the case of Pablo González, he limited himself to asking that the trial be accelerated and that Spain be allowed to provide him with consular assistance, without entering into an assessment of his case.
Gonzalez’s entourage says that his intention is to return to Spain, where he has no open charges. He could do so and move around freely, unless Poland activates an arrest warrant against him, a possibility that is considered remote once he has been released from prison. Gonzalez’s problem is that his Spanish passport was confiscated by the Polish authorities and he would need the Spanish authorities to issue him a new Spanish document. The process is not guaranteed: government sources point out that dual Russian-Spanish nationality is not legally recognised, and if he tried to enter as a Russian citizen, he would have to apply for a visa.
With information from Oscar Lopez-Fonseca and Miguel Gonzalez.
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