Russia – Spain: Espionage case starring a journalist taken from a movie! –

As time passes since the historic exchange of prisoners between Russia and the West that took place in August, the stories of the people the Russian government has asked to be returned to Moscow are preoccupying the international media. Let’s say the story of the “illegal” agents – as the agents of the Russian services are called who have a completely normal life in another country with another name that acts as a cover for their real status – who pretended to be an Argentinian family for almost all their lives , was revealed almost immediately after the exchange because of its specificity. The couple’s children did not even know the status and real nationality of their parents and suddenly flew to Russia.

One of the most interesting stories, as revealed by a relevant report of the British Guardian newspaper, signed by the newspaper’s Central and Eastern Europe correspondent Sean Walker, is that of… a Basque journalist Pablo Gonzalez.

According to the report, Gonzalez, who worked for the Basque Country’s small left-wing newspaper Gara until his arrest in Poland days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on charges of working with Russian intelligence, had a turbulent life. professional and personal double life with responses from the fronts in Ukraine but also elsewhere such as from Nagorno-Karabakh, with interviews with figures of the exiled Russian opposition and with loves even with the daughter of the assassinated opponent of Putin, Boris Nemtsov, Zhana Nemtsova.

Walker argues that if Gonzalez was not himself a member of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, then he was almost certainly an associate. This, according to the report, is not only proven by the fact that he was part of the group of people who demanded and took back the Kremlin from the West, but also by a series of facts that Walker managed to collect, who had personally met Vasco with his colleague of Russian descent.

Pablo González Yagi, as is his full… Basque name, is known in Russia as Pavel Rubtsov (as written on the passport he received in 2004 according to the Guardian). Pablo is the son of Alexei Rubtsov and Elena Gonzalez Yaghi, daughter of Andres Gonzales Yaghi and Galina. Grandpa Yagi was indeed from the Basque country and had arrived in the USSR in 1937 along with 30,000 other unaccompanied minors whose parents lost their lives in the Spanish Civil War and the events of 1936, and were forced to seek asylum in other countries .

Andres Yaghi left Spain at the age of eight for the USSR where he was educated in an orphanage specially designed to teach Spanish children the basic principles of Marxism. He then got a job at a factory of the ZiL car manufacturer, outside Moscow, where he met his wife and with her he had Pablo-Pavel’s mother and her brother.

Elena Yagi gave birth to her son Pavel Rubtsov in 1982 and until 1991 she lived with her husband Alexei in Russia. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Elena took her son and they left for Spain. Alexei shortly afterwards remarried Tatiana Dobrenko. Which according to research by the Guardian journalist himself, but also by the famous Bellingcat researcher-journalist Christo Groszef, is probably a GRU executive.

According to the investigation of the two journalists, the suspicious information about Dobrenko is that there are two records with this name in the registry offices, one born in 1954 and the other in 1959, but both records have the same social security number. At the same time her residential address where she lived with González’s father, is 76 Khorosevskoye Sose right next to the GRU headquarters known as the “Aquarium” and located on the same street at 76B. Walker reports that he found her on Telegram, sent her a relevant message with questions about… Pavel but she blocked him.

On this basis, Pablo Gonzalez, not only does not meet the criteria to be considered an “illegal” agent, but he fully embodies all those characteristics that would allow him to be an excellent GRU agent or collaborator, since he is indeed a Russian who since 1991 he lives in the Basque Country. Moreover, according to the relevant report, this was also his nickname in the circle of those who know him from the Basque Country. They called him “the Russian”.

Although not explicitly mentioned in the Guardian’s report, Gonzalez, in fact, appears to have been using his journalistic capacity as a freelance journalist to contact and extract information from people of interest to the Kremlin and Russian agencies. He was an active member of the Russian “exile” opposition community, frequently interviewing figures of interest to the Russian leadership. For a while, despite being married with two children in Spain (and his wife from the day of his arrest in Poland had tried to create a movement to release him after he had been held for about 2 years without specific charges) he had an affair with Boris Nemtsov’s daughter Zhana.

Nemtsova, because they had become quite close, had, as she reported to the Guardian, some doubts about Pablo, since she could not in any way explain how it was possible for a journalist to have so much money to constantly travel and live well on them , how it was possible for him to speak Russian so well and why he was so interested in the Russian opposition.

Gonzalez – who, we remind you, worked with the small newspaper Gara – had also interviewed Nikol Pashinyan, a leader of the Belarusian opposition, Pavel Latuska, and Ukrainian politicians such as MP Volodymyr Ariyev. He had missions on the front line in the east of Ukraine, while he had attended seminars by Bellingcat, the medium that had done revealing research on the case of the Malaysia Airlines plane, and had met the team and its founder, Elliott Higgins himself . In fact, he had managed to attend a closed meeting of close friends of the now deceased leader of the Russian opposition, Alexei Navalny, in Strasbourg in 2018.

One of his most striking “mistakes” is that Gonzalez told the Russian exile community what they wanted to hear and asked them for advice on how to get a visa for Russia, which he was supposedly trying to get some time, but at the same time he signed reports for Gara from missions in Moscow and appeared in Russia Today.

Gonzalez’s work in Russia during that period, roughly the four-year period 2016-2019, seems to have attracted the interest of other investigative journalists after his arrest, and so Agentstvo, a Russian opposition website, managed to track down Gonzalez’s ticket for a flight from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. On this trip, together with Gonzalez’s ticket, a ticket was booked in the next seat for Sergei Turbin, a person who according to the website is a GRU officer and who, according to research by Christo Grosev, works in the Fifth Department responsible for the… “illegal” agents.

In general, Gonzalez seems to have gathered very good information on the entire Russian opposition, and he also had good information on several individuals and cases. From the investigations after his arrest, it emerged that he had notes with observations and sensitive information, which are estimated to have been the reports he sent to the “Center”.

Through his lawyer, Gonzalez has denied that these were reports, yet he refused to speak or even answer through his lawyer, now a free citizen in Russia, Sean Walker’s questions. According to the Guardian’s report, Gonzalez has declared that he now wants to tell the story from his side. It remains to be seen if he will.

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