Pablo González Yagüe is, with each passing day, more Pável Alekséyevich Rubtsov. The Spanish-Russian with a dual passport leaves behind for the moment his life as an alleged journalist in Spain, as well as his more than two years in a Polish prison, accused of spying for Russia. Now he is preparing his life in Moscow: he gives interviews to pro-government Russian television and shares in X messages against those who accuse him of working for the secret services of Vladimir Putin. He was released on August 1 along with seven other high-level Russian prisoners abroad, accused of espionage and murder, among other crimes, in the largest prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War.
“He is trying to organize his life in Moscow, where he lives with his father, and he doesn’t have a job at the moment“, sources close to González assure this newspaper. “He has no other option because there is an arrest warrant issued by Poland that prevents him from entering the Schengen area.” Poland formally accused him of espionage after his release.
With every passing day, the Spanish journalist Pablo González is more like Pável Rubtsov, the alleged Russian spy. 126 days in which evidence of his collaboration with the Russian Central Intelligence Department (GRU) has been accumulating. Some are indirect, such as the fact that he was one of Putin’s picks along with other high-level assets. Others are more specific. The last one arrived a week ago. The anti-Putin investigative media, The Insider, analyzed the images of the welcome reception at the Moscow airport for Pablo González and the rest of those released in the exchange. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself went to receive them, who shook hands with Pablo González. In the airport terminal room there was another person who at first went unnoticed, but who The Insider has identified as Oleg Sotnikov, a GRU agent wanted and captured by the United States. Sotnikov approaches González and gives him a big hug. According to the investigation, he would be González’s coordinator with the Russian spy services.
Pablo Gonzalez hugs a Russian spy / NACHO GARCÍA / THE INSIDER
Pablo González also followed the Russian opponent Alexéi Navalni, that he would end up dead in a Russian prison, and prepared a report of his medical treatments in the clinics in Barcelona and Lausanne (Switzerland), according to the newspaper El Mundo, which has had access to documents and reports from Spanish and foreign intelligence about him. He also traveled on a plane with GRU intelligence agent Sergei Turbin. And he sent reports to Moscow on the movements of the Russian opposition abroad, according to previous publications by Russian opposition media that cited documents from the Polish intelligence services.
Why don’t you talk to the Spanish press?
Pablo González does not want to talk to the Spanish media. There have been several formal requests for interviews, all rejected, as this newspaper has learned. He is in a friendly country, he is a journalist and knows how to communicate. Why don’t you address the Spanish public opinion?
Yes, he has granted one. In a ten minute report it appears walking through his childhood neighborhood. “I lived in this house for the last two years before we went to Spain. This is the school I went to, public school 113,” says the Spanish-Russian while walking with the journalist. “Here in winter we had a mountain of snow for children and we went down on sleds or sitting on the cardboard, some of us standing.”
The piece describes how his arrest was. Eight Polish intelligence agents went to his house, searched his room, confiscated his belongings and detained him. “For nine months they pressured me in prison to confess to being a Russian spy. I asked them: but what did I do? What exactly am I accused of? They answered me: you know perfectly well why you are here. But I didn’t know,” he says in Russian. He denies all accusations. He was assigned a Polish lawyer who insisted that he plead guilty, according to his testimony, but he was not able to speak with the Spaniard Gonzalo Boye until nine months after his arrest.
He alleges that they put him in the cell with head of a criminal gang so that he could convince him to plead guilty. “In the end we became friends. And he told me: the way they put pressure on you, it seems like they don’t have anything solid against you. So keep it up.”
He claims that they later put him in an isolation cell, with permanent recording and in “dire” conditions. He lost 20 kilos. Once he received a visit from a prison psychologist. “It was a 15-minute monologue from the psychologist. and in the end he said that, if I am so dissatisfied, I should consider suicide,” adds González.
He narrates his liberation. “Suddenly [en el tránsito en Ankara, Turquía] The Russian services enter and ask all foreigners to leave. The boys from the Alpha Group [unidad antiterrorista de operaciones especiales del Servicio Federal de Seguridad (FSB)]. That’s when we began to feel that we were no longer prisoners, and that we were with people who were going to defend us. When I get on the plane, and I see the Russian stewardess, there I could no longer contain my smile,” González tells his interviewer. “I get off the plane and from the stairs I see that the president receives us. I started rehearsing the handshake […] “I wanted it to be a man’s handshake.”
Spanish children of war and the KGB
“Almost all of the Spanish children of the war with dual nationality were approached by the KGB when we finished high school and offered us studies,” explains to this newspaper a Spanish-Russian citizen, grandson of the Children of War and who prefers not to give his opinion. name and that matched Pablo González (Moscow, 1982) when he was little in the Russian capital in the eighties. “Almost all of us of Spanish descent lived in the same neighborhoods,” he adds. Having a European passport was, says this source, an asset for the Russian intelligence services.
Between 1937 and 1938, when the Republic was about to be defeated by Franco’s coup plotters during the Spanish Civil War, nearly 40,000 children were sent to the Soviet Union. Pablo González Yagüe He is the grandson of one of them. He moved to Spain in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, with his Spanish-Russian mother, after she divorced his father, Alexei Rubtsov. They went to live in the Basque Country. He continued to visit Russia often.
The women in the life of Pablo González
“He was a spy, I have no doubt. I am 100% sure“, the exiled Russian journalist told the BBC in September Zhanna Nemtsova, that he received documents about González’s alleged activities but cannot give details because he signed a confidentiality agreement in this regard. “He can be charming, he knows how to communicate with people and make them feel good.”
Pablo maintained a romantic relationship with Nemtsova, according to several sources consulted. She describes it in the interview with the British media as a friendly relationship. Gonzalez allegedly accessed his computer and obtained information about the various Russian activists in his circle. Nemtsova is the daughter of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, murdered near the Kremlin in 2015.
When he was arrested in Poland in February 2022, four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Pablo González was in a romantic relationship with another journalist, Magdalena Chodownik. She was accused of being González’s accomplice in espionage in a separate procedure opened by the Polish Prosecutor’s Office. They are no longer together.
The third key woman in González’s story is Oihana Goiriena. She is the mother of his three children. They had not been in a relationship for a long time. He himself made it clear in a letter of gratitude to the activists of the Free Pablo campaign, to which EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA has had access.
“Thank you all for your support and the incredible work you are doing for my release. “It gives me strength to resist,” reads the handwritten letter in English. “I have seen that you have even made a website. I hope to see you soon. But I wanted you to change some information. My address is in Elantxobe, not in Nabarniz. And Oihana is not my partner, but my friend and the mother of my children. My current partner is, as you know, Magda. I ask you to respect that fact.”
Free Pablo Campaign
“This is our last tweet: Pablo is, finally, free,” reads the last message in X of the Free Pablo campaign, a group of activists and friends of Pablo González who mobilized during the almost 900 days he spent in detention. without trial in a Polish prison. “Infinite thanks to all.”
They participated in it well-known voices of national politics, such as Irene Montero, and actors such as actors Juan Diego Botto, Carlos Bardem or Willy Toledo, journalists such as Ana Pardo de Vera or Teresa Aranguren and judge Baltasar Garzón, among others. They criticized the Government for “doing nothing” while a Spanish citizen was held “without charge” in a Polish prison “isolated” and with hardly any contact with his family.
The Federation of Associations of Journalists of Spain In a statement, he demanded that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, intercede “at the highest level” with their Polish counterparts “to obtain the immediate release of the imprisoned journalist.” The minister insisted that he received regular visits from the consul. More than other prisoners, he alleged.
The international organization of journalists also called for his release. Reporters Without Borders. “After two years of imprisonment in Poland accused of espionage, RSF urges that Pablo González be released so that he can defend himself in court” against accusations “that had not been substantiated.”
What do these associations say now?
“At RSF we have no feeling of guilt. “We would regret not having defended him without evidence, having simply decided that this man is guilty and did not deserve our protection,” he points out in conversation with this newspaper. Edith Rodríguezvice president of RSF Spain. “But, by allegedly using being a journalist as a cover, you put other journalists at risk. And you collaborate with a country that predators journalists, that murders them. From Nóvaya Gazeta alone, six journalists murdered.”
