December 11, 2024

An Agent for All, an Agent for None?


An Agent for All, an Agent for None?
Nomma Zarubina at a "Rethinking Russian's future" conference.  Facebook, Nomma Zarubina

Nomma Zarubina, a Russian citizen living in New York, has been arrested for giving false testimony to FBI agents while also giving intel to the FSB.

Zarubina, 34, who had been residing in the US since 2016, claims to have been contacted by the FSB in 2020, whereupon she began working with an agent located in her home city of Tomsk. Zarubina had begun giving "voluntary interviews" to FBI agents in 2018, after appearing as a witness in the trial of Elena Branson, a Russian-American dual citizen convicted in 2022 of acting as a Russian agent in the United States. 

The current FBI investigation charges Zarubina with withholding the information from US authorities that she was also cooperating with FSB agents. The indictment states that Zarubina's responsibilities as an agent included establishing contacts among journalists and employees of think tanks in the United States and other countries, as well as finding people willing to publish positive materials about Russia. Zarubina says that she did indeed receive such requests from FSB officers, but she never carried them out and "never encouraged foreigners to go to Russia."

Zarubina was arrested on November 21 and is currently on bail in New York. 

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