Pablo González selfie with Alexey Navalny. Photo: El Mundo
An agent with Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency who was exchanged as part of the largest ever prisoner swap between Russia and the West in August, has been revealed to have spied on late opposition politician Alexey Navalny, Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported on Sunday.
According to the Polish investigation into Pablo González shared with El Mundo, the GRU agent met Navalny in Europe at least twice while officially working as a journalist for a Basque newspaper. One of the meetings occurred in Barcelona, where Navalny had flown for treatment after twice being doused with green dye in 2017. Polish intelligence believes González was carrying out surveillance on Navalny for the GRU.
He is also believed to have shared wifi passwords of venues where opposition figures were known to meet with his handlers in Moscow to allow them to more easily hack members of the Russian opposition.
Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February in what appears to have been a poisoning.
González was detained in Poland in February 2022 on suspicion of espionage. Independent media outlet Agentstvo reported in May 2023 that González had probably been an agent embedded by the GRU in the entourage of Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.
González was born Pavel Rubtsov in the USSR to a Russian father and Spanish mother, though by the late 1980s, González’s mother had relocated to her Spain, and brought her son with her, changing his name to Pablo González Yagüe.
Immediately before the Russian invasion began, González was in eastern Ukraine from where he was ostensibly reporting, when he received a call from a Ukrainian intelligence officer requesting he come to Kyiv. There, he was interrogated and accused of “pro-Russian bias”, but was subsequently released. He was then arrested in Poland just days later while attempting to re-enter Ukraine.
