Pablo González infiltrated as a journalist in Ukrainian military facilities, the largest energy plant in Poland, at the wedding of a US Army officer in Georgia, and even at a NATO Assembly to provide detailed reports to the Russian Military Intelligence Service.
The investigation against the Spanish-Russian reporter for espionage in favor of the Kremlin, coordinated by the Polish justice system, has seized a series of reports detailing these and other similar operations from his electronic devices.
EL MUNDO has exclusively accessed dozens of documents that González was holding when he was arrested by the Polish authorities in February 2022 on laptops, iPads, portable hard drives, and mobile phones.
According to evidence gathered by this newspaper through various Spanish and foreign intelligence sources, not only did he possess a report on Putin's main opponent, Alexei Navalny, including the addresses of the clinics where he was treated for the 2017 attack, but his hard drives also contained, among other things, military maneuvers in Ukrainian training camps.
Often, Russian intelligence agents are required to report on every person they know. Among other things, this is to prevent them from crossing paths with agents from other secret services of countries that Moscow already has on file. Pablo González described the circumstances of his acquaintance with the Polish citizen Magdalena Jodovnik, a journalist with whom he had a relationship and with whom he shared an apartment and work trips - even to Syria - and to whom he never revealed his espionage activities. "She bought into my cover story", he wrote in one of his reports, according to the Russian outlet Agentsvo. However, González provided Moscow with the girl's biography and characteristics. Pablo González - who also used the Russian identity of Pavel Rubtsov as he was born in Moscow and had a Russian passport - prepared a document between March 21 and April 2, 2016, titled "Business Trip to Ukraine".
Under this misleading heading, he reported on his incursion during those dates into Ukrainian military facilities. According to intelligence reports that have analyzed this infiltration, considered one of the most relevant carried out following GRU instructions, González traveled to Ukraine following orders from the Russian military intelligence, of which he was "formally" a part, according to judicial investigations, since at least 2016. On that occasion, his objective was to "gather information on political issues and, in particular, on military matters". To do so, he claimed to the Ukrainian authorities that he was conducting "journalistic work" and that his interest was specifically motivated by a "master's thesis", as well as by a collaboration with the Basque newspaper Gara on the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. At the same time, he stated that he was preparing a report on the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community.
During this trip, he met Alena Sytnik at the Under Wonder restaurant, whom he asked for help to visit a military training camp located in Lviv, just 40 kilometers from the Polish border. But he also expressed interest in accessing the NATO liaison office. They then had a meeting at another restaurant with a friend of his contact, Taras Dziuba, who helped him process permits with the Ministry of Defense. The Polish Justice system maintains that González reported all these movements in real-time to the GRU through secret communications. The journalist was finally received on March 30, 2016, by Colonel Taras Gren, who granted him access - along with the photographer Juan Teixeira - to the military facilities and allowed him to have conversations with American and Canadian instructors and attend at least three different military exercises carried out by Ukrainian troops. During that trip, González also prepared "a report on the LGBTQ+ community"; attended a demonstration of Chernobyl veterans in front of the Ukrainian Government headquarters, visited the old nuclear plant in person, met in a café with the Deputy Minister of Ecology of Ukraine, Svitlana Kolomiec, as well as with Volodymyr Ariev, linked to the Council of Ukraine, who helped him get accredited.
In his movements in Georgia, he also focused on meeting with a military man named Giorgi Shonia who was about to marry a US Army officer, Katrina Hensley. Regarding the latter, he drafted a document detailing her resume and emphasized that it was "advisable" to attend the wedding, to which he had been invited. In this way, he argued to his superiors, he would strengthen friendship ties with the Georgian military and dispel any suspicion that he was approaching them to obtain sensitive information.
As reflected in González's computer files, the reporter returned to Georgia in June 2019. This time to make contact with an American, Justin Tomczyk, whom he believed had an "anti-Russian attitude" and was certain that he was collaborating or would collaborate in the future with the American Secret Service.
González applied Moscow's vocabulary diligently, which labels as anti-Russian or Russophobic any professional who rejects Kremlin policies. Similarly, anyone who is not favorable or neutral towards Moscow's actions is considered an operative of the American intelligence services. That same year, he reported having interviewed other American citizens in Ukraine linked to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and to the Freedom House in the country, an organization defending democracy that promotes the fight against fascism worldwide.
On more than one occasion, González boasted to his superiors about his other role as a Russian operative: not only gathering data but covertly spreading government narratives. "It seems I managed to sow a seed of doubt among the Euro-Atlanticists", he bragged about the results of the Forum in Rzeszow, Poland.
One of the most prominent reports he prepared in his early years of collaboration with Russian military intelligence targeted the NATO Parliamentary Assembly session held between May 26 and 29 in the Georgian town of Tbilisi. In that document, González constantly highlighted that "the speeches had an anti-Russian tone" and had been prepared "to present the Russian Federation as a threat to NATO". He also emphasized the speeches of the Georgian Minister of Defense, who emphasized the need to "strengthen the country's missile defense with French systems and the possibility of quickly acquiring American anti-tank systems".
"He believes that they must be prepared for the possibility that, in case of war, military units must beready for nuclear action".
"From the evidence obtained, it is concluded that he was waiting to receive orders from individuals operating within the GRU structure," Polish authorities conclude, who also discovered that González had in his possession a video and photographs of the Siekierki cogeneration power plant in Warsaw, the most important in the country and one of the largest in Europe. Since the start of the war, the energy systems of Central European countries have been targeted for completed or thwarted sabotage to provoke division among the population due to the strong support for Ukraine from most of their governments.