Daily Times

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, reporters from around the world rushed to the Polish-Ukrainian border to cover an exodus of refugees fleeing Russian bombs.

Among them was Pablo González, a freelance journalist from Spain who had been based in Poland since 2019, working for Spanish news agency EFE, Voice of America and other outlets. Warsaw-based reporters knew him as an outgoing colleague who liked to drink beer and sing karaoke into the wee hours of the morning.

Two and a half years later, he was sent to Moscow as part of a prisoner swap, leaving behind both mysteries about who he really was and concerns about how Poland handled a case in which he was accused of being a Russian agent.

In the first days of the war, González provided stand-up reports to TV viewers in Spain against a backdrop of refugees arriving at the train station in the Polish border town of Przemysl.

But less than week into the war, Polish security agents entered the room he was staying in and arrested him. They accused him of “participating in foreign intelligence activities against Poland” and said he was an agent of the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

Friends were astonished – and, as Poland held González without trial for months that turned into years, some grew skeptical and organized protests in Spain demanding his release. Authorities have never detailed the accusations.

But on Thursday evening, the burly 42-year-old with a shaved head and beard was welcomed home by President Vladimir Putin after being freed in the largest prisoner swap since the Soviet era.

His inclusion in the deal appears to confirm suspicions that González was a Russian operative using his cover as a journalist. Born Pavel Rubtsov in 1982 in then-Soviet Moscow, González went to Spain with his Spanish mother at age 9, where he became a citizen and received the Spanish name of Pablo González Yagüe. He went into journalism, working for outlets Público, La Sexta and Gara, a Basque nationalist newspaper.

It’s not clear what led Poland to arrest him. The investigation remains classified and the spokesman for the secret services told The Associated Press that he could not say anything beyond what was in a brief statement. Poland is on high alert after a string of arrests of espionage suspects and sabotage, part of what the authorities view as hybrid warfare by Russia and Belarus against the West.

Polish security services said Poland included him in the deal due to the close Polish-American alliance and “common security interests.” In their statement, they said that “Pavel Rubtsov, a GRU officer arrested in Poland in 2022, (had been) carrying out intelligence tasks in Europe.” The head of Britain´s foreign intelligence agency MI6, Sir Richard Moore, said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022 that González was an “illegal” who was arrested in Poland after “masquerading as a Spanish journalist.” The term “illegal” refers to spies who operate under non-official cover, meaning that they don’t benefit from diplomatic immunity. “He was trying to go into Ukraine to be part of their destabilizing efforts there,” Moore said. Another hint at his activities came from independent Russian outlet Agentstvo, which reported that in 2016 Rubtsov befriended and spied on Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in Moscow in 2015.