Pablo Gonzalez: GRU agent among the “good Russians”

Pablo Gonzalez is a 42-year-old Spanish journalist who has worked in combat zones in various countries, particularly in Ukraine. In February 2022, the Polish government arrested him and accused him of spying for Russian intelligence. It turned out that Gonzalez has a Russian passport and a middle name - Pavel Rubtsov. Prosecutors say he spent years transmitting data from Ukraine's front-line territories and spying on Russian opposition figures in Europe.

For several years, Gonzalez dated the daughter of Boris Nemtsov and was friends with her friends. Subsequently, he described these meetings in detail in reports, probably for the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation. Guardian journalist Sean Walker interviewed dozens of people who knew Gonzalez, spoke with Polish prosecutors and members of the Ukrainian and Polish intelligence services. Babel chose the most interesting of what he learned.

1

On February 24, 2022, a journalist from the Basque Country (an autonomous commune in Spain since 1979) Pablo Gonzalez arrived in the border town of Przemysl. There he spoke about Ukrainian refugees for Spanish TV channels and online media.

Four days later, Poland's internal security agency arrested Gonzalez in his dorm room. He was accused of working for Russian intelligence for a long time. Gonzalez faced up to 10 years in prison.

Gonzalez with Ukrainian refugee students from Nigeria who fled to Poland due to the full-scale Russian invasion, February 27, 2022. On the night of the same day, Polish security services arrested Gonzalez.

The head of British intelligence MI6, Richard Moore, believes that Gonzalez was “masquerading as a Spanish journalist.” He says that Gonzalez was actually Pavel Rubtsov, an illegal Russian spy who took over the identity of a foreigner.

Boris Nemtsov's daughter Zhanna, with whom Gonzalez met and lived in Europe for several years, considered him a Spaniard and did not know about his Russian roots. However, some of Gonzalez's Spanish colleagues say that he never hid his real name and the fact that he was born in Moscow.

For two years, Poland has not released any evidence against Gonzalez or set trial dates. His lawyer says this confirms the case is false. Pablo's Spanish wife thinks the same.

In August 2024, during the exchange of political prisoners between Russia and the West, Gonzalez returned to Moscow. Together with him, a couple of spies posing as Argentines and Russian special forces soldier Vadim Krasikov were released. Vladimir Putin met them at the airport. Speaking on Russian television, Gonzalez recalled being worried whether he would be able to shake Putin's hand "with dignity and strength."

“You have to be very naive to think that Russia travels all over the world to save journalists. I think that with this handshake [with Putin] he proved his guilt,” says a friend of Gonzalez who worked with him in the Spanish media.

2

Guardian journalist Sean Walker met Gonzalez in 2011 at a training session where media professionals were taught how to work in a war zone. Then he introduced himself as a Spanish freelancer.

In fact, Gonzalez was born in Moscow in 1982. In the late 1990s, his parents divorced. His mother, who had Spanish roots, took Pavel to Spain, where she granted him citizenship in the name of Pablo Gonzalez. The guy often came to his father in Russia, where in 2004 he received a passport as Pavel Rubtsov. In Moscow, he worked for some time as a journalist at the RBC media holding, where his father held a senior position.

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In addition, the Russian media Agency processed a leak from the Russian Federation air ticket booking database. Investigators say that in June 2017, someone purchased two plane tickets from Moscow to St. Petersburg and back. One for Pavel Rubtsov, the other for GRU officer Sergei Turbin, who works in the Fifth Directorate of the GRU and manages illegal spies.

Journalists who have worked with Gonzalez call him charismatic. He easily established contacts with high-ranking officials, although he worked for small Spanish publications. He behaved bravely in the combat zone. For example, during shelling in Nagorno-Karabakh, he delivered two seriously wounded French journalists to a safe place.

In March 2014, Gonzalez and Sean Walker, with the help of a Ukrainian journalist, infiltrated a military base in Crimea. There they communicated with Ukrainian marines who were under siege. Having agreed with them, the journalists left the recorder. They recorded an emotional conversation with a senior general of the Russian army, who ordered the military to surrender. Perhaps Gonzalez was performing more than just journalistic assignments at the time, Walker suggests.

3

In 2016, Gonzalez met the daughter of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, Zhanna, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), where she called on participants to appoint a special rapporteur for the assembly to investigate the murder of her father.

During the break, Gonzalez asked her for comment. He introduced himself as a journalist for a regional newspaper from the Basque Country, Gara, and spoke Russian with a slight accent, Nemtsova recalls. She initially declined the interview, but eventually met with Pablo. “I don’t remember a single question, so there was nothing unusual,” Nemtsova recalls.

After this meeting, Zhanna added Gonzalez’s email to the mailing list of invitations to public events of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation. He came to every meeting where he got to know her better. Soon they started dating. Thanks to Nemtsova, Gonzalez met many Russian oppositionists who lived abroad. For example, with Ilya Yashin.

They say Gonzalez was "bubbly, talkative, warm" and always down for a beer. He kept in touch with them for years and gave them tours when they came to Spain. For example, he once took a group of Russians to a club near his home in the Basque Country, where he “seemed to know everyone.”

Gonzalez told his Russian friends little about himself. He said that he was married and had children, but his marriage was falling apart and he and his wife were just friends. Gonzalez mentioned Russian origin, but insisted that he had not been to Russia since childhood. And he complained that he could not get a visa to the Russian Federation.

During the same period, Gonzalez traveled around Russia by plane with GRU officer Turbin. He wrote several reports for Gara from Moscow. Pablo also worked for Russia Today, where in one of the stories he accused the “pro-Western government of Ukraine” of paying the Spanish newspaper for “favorable coverage of events.”

Gonzalez did not hide the fact that he supports LDNR. Russian oppositionists ignored such thoughts because of his Basque origin.

Nemtsova decided simply not to discuss politics with him when she realized that he “looks at the world a little differently.”

4

Gonzalez often visited Ukraine and worked in the ATO zone. The Guardian's source in the SBU says that for many years he came to the front line and to front-line cities, where he collected information about the people who work there. He also collaborated with many local politicians and military personnel. The SBU is still finding out whether among Gonzalez’s contacts there are those who knew that he was a spy.

At the end of 2017, at a Bellingcat training session, Gonzalez met leading investigative journalists who might be of interest to the GRU. For example, with Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins. He also became friends with a senior executive at a technology company that subsequently signed a contract with the US government department worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2018, Gonzalez met with Alexei Navalny at the European Court of Human Rights. After the speech, Navalny threw a party for close friends at the house of one of his lawyers, which Gonzalez also attended. At that meeting, Navalny's lawyer Vadim Prokhorov joked that Gonzalez looked and sounded like a typical Russian from a "dysfunctional neighborhood in Moscow." Spanish investigators from El Mundo write that Gonzalez passed on information about clinics in Barcelona and Lausanne where Navalny was treated.

Subsequently, in 2019, more and more of Gonzalez's Russian friends began to notice changes in his personality. Nemtsova says she knew “two different Pablos.” One was "charming and easy to talk to" and the other was "rude and aggressive."

The worse their relationship became, the more questions Nemtsova asked herself. For example, where does a freelancer who writes columns for small Spanish media get so much money for constant travel and the latest technology?

5

In 2019, Gonzalez moved to Warsaw, where he rented a house with a new girlfriend, a Polish freelance journalist. In February 2022, she was arrested along with Gonzalez. However, the judge ordered her release because there was not enough evidence to keep her in custody. In August 2024, Polish media reported that a case was still open against her for complicity in espionage. Although prosecutors have no evidence that she knew what her partner was doing.

Gonzalez regularly reported on the war in Ukraine and interviewed senior officials. For example, the President of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and the Belarusian opposition activist and former official Pavel Latushko.

At the beginning of February 2022, Gonzalez arrived in Avdeevka. There he was detained by the police and sent for questioning in Kyiv. Law enforcement officers accused Gonzalez of espionage and demanded access to his phone. In the end, they found no evidence of guilt and released him, advising him to immediately leave the country. Gonzalez returned to Spain.

A few days after this, Spanish intelligence questioned Gonzalez's friends and relatives in the Basque Country about his past. An irritated Gonzalez denied that his family was a front. Gonzalez's lawyer says he has "always denied" that he worked for Russian intelligence.

On February 24, 2022, Gonzalez arrived in Przemysl, where he was detained by Polish intelligence services. They say the information from the "allied country's investigative service" was incomplete, so they planned a major investigation while Gonzalez was in custody.

Polish prosecutors have collected a series of reports that Gonzalez wrote over several years, probably for senior officials in the GRU. In them, he reports on Ukrainian critical facilities and infrastructure, people “who need to be in touch with,” and various operations. For example, in 2018, he wrote that “on orders, he destroyed electronic devices” - he broke them into pieces and threw them into the ocean.

Among the evidence there are also many reports about his friends - Russian oppositionists. He passed on confidential information, such as the home addresses of Nemtsova's foundation employees and copies of Boris Nemtsov's personal emails. Jeanne confirmed that she once lent Gonzalez her father's personal laptop. It also transmitted Wi-Fi passwords to places where Russians gathered, leaving their laptops vulnerable to hacking.

In his reports, Gonzalez also wrote about everyday things, for example, about going to a football match with Yashin. Yashin tells The Guardian journalist that Gonzalez's reports are unlikely to harm him because he never shared anything personal with him.

However, the former head of Poland's Foreign Intelligence Service, Piotr Krawczyk, believes that profiling targets is a key part of intelligence officers' work. Moscow spies can use them to recruit a target or predict where they will be in order to kidnap or kill them.

6

Returning to Moscow, Gonzalez again runs social networks, communicates with Spanish friends and his lawyer. He and his closest friends refuse interviews because Gonzalez himself “wants to tell his story.” Intelligence agencies and officials involved in the investigation have different theories about how long Gonzalez has been working for the GRU.

Some of them believe that he was recruited at a young age, and his entire career is a cover for espionage. Others say that Gonzalez was recruited during one of his trips to Moscow to visit his father and stepmother and that he was indeed a Spanish journalist with Russian roots.

Publicly, Polish officials say Gonzalez holds the rank of officer in the GRU, but have not backed this up with evidence. In a conversation with a journalist from The Guardian, another official says that Gonzalez was an amateur - he often made mistakes and was lazy in completing tasks.

Investigators at Spanish broadcaster Antena3 say Gonzalez has been working for Russian intelligence for about 15 years. They received a letter from Gonzalez to the GRU, which he wrote in 2017.

“I have been receiving this salary [€3,100 per month] since 2010,” writes Gonzalez and asks to increase it to €4,300, justifying this with high inflation. He also wants to get an apartment in Moscow and for the government to recognize his work history and subsequently pay him a pension. But journalists do not attach a copy of the letter to confirm their words.