Photo: Rita Flores | By Shaun Walker, The Guardian | First came the blackmail and death threats to secure cooperation, then came a series of tasks, each more sinister than the last: to inform on fellow activists, to elicit personal information from protest-minded artists and – eventually – to help with a plot to kidnap and murder a Kremlin enemy.
That is how Rita Flores, a 29-year-old Russian artist, activist and former member of the Pussy Riot collective, described her recruitment and three-year handling by officers from Russia’s FSB security service, a cooperation she only broke when she fled the country last month.
Flores made details of her collaboration public in a video discussion with her lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, published just days after she left Russia at the end of August. She explained she was coming clean in the hope that others in a similar situation might feel emboldened to break their ties with the FSB.
Now, in her first media interview since leaving Russia, she gave further detail on how she was recruited and run by the FSB. “For the first time in years, I feel calm. All this time I was dreaming about getting out and being able to talk about it all,” she said. The Guardian could not corroborate the details of Flores’s account, but there have been numerous cases of the FSB infiltrating opposition groups over the past few years.
Flores, also known as Margarita Konovalova, has been associated with Pussy Riot since 2020, when she was detained after a performance near the Kremlin. She had served several short stints in jail and been subjected to surveillance and house searches on numerous occasions, which intensified after the domestic crackdown that followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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No, this is not a movie plot. Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/19/pussy-riot-russian-spies-fsb-activists-rita-flores
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! https://www.femmusic.com ]
Photo: Rita Flores | Courtesy Rita Flores
Rita Flores claims that after her recruitment she instigated fights with fellow artists to push them away, and prevent them sharing information with her.
One of Flores’s handlers promised to ‘re-educate’ her until she became an ‘obedient wife’. Photograph: courtesy Rita Flores
