Pussy Riot member describes three years as FSB informant before fleeing Russia

Rita Flores spent three years living a double life in Moscow, reporting to Russian security officers while maintaining her public identity as an artist and activist. The arrangement began in February 2023, after a police search of her apartment, when two men who identified themselves as FSB officers stayed behind to make her an offer she could not refuse. They threatened to prosecute her under wartime censorship laws for an Instagram post criticizing Russian military actions in Ukraine. They also suggested, with deliberate casualness, that they could arrange for her mother to be killed if she declined to cooperate. Flores, then 26, signed the papers. For her compliance, she received a one-time payment of 30,000 to 40,000 roubles—roughly £266 to £355.

The two officers became her regular handlers. The senior one, whom Flores came to call "the Jacket" for the shiny black suit he favored, was crude and in his late forties. He introduced himself by different names at different meetings. The junior officer, Ivan, became her primary contact and adopted a friendlier demeanor, though both men understood their roles in a calculated psychological operation. Ivan would alternate between warmth and menace, casually mentioning that her mother would be killed if she tried to leave the country, then laughing as though it were a joke. The Jacket never joked. His threats were direct and unadorned.

Her initial assignments were straightforward: gather information about opposition-minded artists in her circles and report back. Flores said she was instructed to tell no one, but she immediately told about twenty people, a decision she attributed to being, as she put it, a "massive gossip." She did not, however, inform the artists she was supposed to be monitoring. Instead, she manufactured conflicts with them on pretexts designed to push them away, preventing them from sharing sensitive information with her. As the war in Ukraine deepened and most protest-minded artists fled the country, her pool of targets shrank. She described wartime Moscow as a place of profound contradiction: restaurants and clubs opening, events multiplying, yet the people who understood the reality of the moment moving through the city with empty eyes and hollow words. The artists who remained had internalized the rules of survival. They produced work stripped of any political resonance—flowers in vases, nothing more.

By May 2025, Ivan and the Jacket escalated their demands. They began asking questions about Pyotr Verzilov, an activist with historical ties to Pussy Riot who had fled to Ukraine and was fighting with the Ukrainian military. The Russian authorities had long viewed Verzilov as a threat; German doctors had suggested in 2018 that he had been poisoned while in Russia. Flores's handlers wanted her to extract information from him—his address in Ukraine, the details of his movements. Then they proposed a plan: she would use their old friendship to lure him to a meeting in Serbia, where an FSB squad would be waiting to kidnap and kill him. Ivan began paying her 50,000 roubles per month as additional incentive.

Flores was already plotting her escape. She married her partner in September 2025, partly as a way to deflect the Serbia assignment—she could tell Ivan that her husband would never permit her to travel alone to meet another man. Her handlers had previously forbidden her from leaving Russia, but when she contacted her lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, she learned that departure was possible. The two began planning in secret. Zakhvatov later described the FSB's control as an illusion: "They created a reality where she felt like they controlled everything, but actually it is not that hard to leave." In August 2026, Flores left Russia.

Days after her departure, she and Zakhvatov released a video in which she described her recruitment and three years of coercion. "For the first time in years, I feel calm," she said. "All this time I was dreaming about getting out and being able to talk about it all." She made the disclosure, she explained, hoping that others in similar circumstances might find the courage to break free. The Guardian could not independently verify the details of her account, though the FSB has a documented history of infiltrating opposition groups in recent years. Zakhvatov announced a secure line for people in comparable situations to contact him. Flores said she wanted to help others escape as well, and she expressed certainty that FSB recruitment of activists was widespread—a "mass phenomenon." She had discovered that at least one person in her own circle had informed on her before she agreed to cooperate; the FSB possessed a sex tape of her that had been covertly filmed by that person.

Her public confession drew mixed responses from the exiled Russian opposition. Some praised her bravery in explaining how the FSB operates. Others expressed skepticism about her decision to cooperate for so long. Masha Alekhina, a fellow Pussy Riot member who had herself fled Russia in 2022 by disguising herself as a food delivery courier, offered a measured perspective: "It's not a big secret that it's not great to work for the FSB, but fear can change a person. It's important that she's now out of the country and that she said what happened to her out loud. Nobody was killed and nobody went to prison because of her, so that is good news." Flores has since been calling people she informed on and other old friends to explain herself. She said everyone had been supportive.