Moscow’s alleged ‘decolonization’ mole The FBI says a political networker in New York lied for years about her secret contact and cooperation with Russian intelligence
Remember Maria Butina? In July 2018, the FBI arrested her on suspicion of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Russian government. After nine months in pretrial detention, Butina pleaded guilty to felony charges under 18 U.S.C. §951 and spent another five months at a federal prison in Florida before she was deported home to Russia. Today, she is a sitting member of the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament.
Last month, the FBI accused another Russian woman of concealing her collaboration with the Russian state. The charges against 34-year-old Nomma Zarubina allege felony offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 1001: lying to the executive branch of the U.S. government. According to the FBI’s complaint, Zarubina lied twice during voluntary interviews about her communication and cooperation with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Meduza explains what we know about Zarubina’s case and how she spent the past several years networking in the United States.
The charges
The FBI alleges that Zarubina knowingly made false statements in interviews in April 2021 and September 2023, claiming that the FSB had interviewed her only once about her time and activities in the U.S.
In July 2024, after roughly four years of regular conversations with the FBI, Zarubina finally admitted that an FSB officer had previously assigned her the codename “Alyssa” and asked her to “identify potentially helpful contacts in the United States, including American journalists and military personnel, and provide contact information for those individuals to the FSB” so the agency “could come up with reasons to invite those people to Russia to ‘convert’ them to the ‘Russian way of thinking,’” according to the FBI.
The charges highlight Zarubina’s frequent attendance at “seminars, forums, and conventions also attended by prominent members of academia, foreign policy, the U.S. government, and the media” and argue that these networking efforts are consistent with the FSB’s requests.
Zarubina’s past
Nomma Zarubina’s first meeting with the FBI was in October 2020. It was a voluntary interview held at a restaurant in Brooklyn not long after a raid on the home office of Elena Branson, the founder and director of the Russian Center New York, where Zarubina worked as a “political affairs officer” from September 2016 until February 2022.
Zarubina’s close relationship with Branson (who is her daughter’s godmother) made her a person of interest as the FBI moved forward with felony charges against Branson for acting on behalf and at the direction and control of the Russian government. (Branson fled the U.S. around the time of Zarubina’s FBI meeting in Brooklyn and never returned.)
According to her Vkontakte page, Zarubina married soon after moving to the United States in 2016. She spent the next six years working at various Russia-connected organizations, including RCNY, a Moscow-based company called Gold of Eurasia, and the English-language publication Russian Time. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zarubina cut ties with these groups and listed herself as a political consultant on LinkedIn.
Since February 2022, Zarubina has frequently spoken at events staged by the Free Nations of PostRussia Forum, which Russia’s Prosecutor General banned as a terrorist organization two weeks ago. In fact, the same day the FBI filed charges against Zarubina, she joined the forum’s panel at a conference in Canada to discuss Russia’s “decolonization.”
In 2022, Zarubina joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies incoming class of Fall Fellows. Her biography at CSIS touts her experience “as a business connector between the private and public sectors” and work “with the Russian and American government authorities using public diplomacy.”
Zarubina has also attended anti-Kremlin opposition events in the U.S. For example, Leonid Volkov (one of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s leaders) said on Monday that she came to one of his speeches in New York City in January 2023. (She apparently looked at her phone throughout the speech, grabbed a selfie with Volkov afterward, and then bolted.)
In June 2024, Zarubina was photographed with retired U.S. General Kenneth Franklin McKenzie Jr. (the former head of U.S. Central Command) and with retired Major General Bruce Lawlor (the first Department of Homeland Security chief of staff).
However, before her networking efforts among the Kremlin’s critics in the U.S., Zarubina often sympathized with the Putin regime in posts on social media. Journalists at Agentstvo Media dug through her Vkontakte page and found several examples of Russian chauvinism, including a lecture on “Russkiy Mir” by Eurasianist ideologue Alexander Dugin and two speeches by Vladimir Putin endorsing the annexation of Crimea. She also shared Dostoevsky quotes attacking liberals and an article about the “dirt and devastation” in the U.S., and she wrote that “Russia is legislatively freer than the West.” In 2017, she posted a photo of herself with a Russian flag and the caption: “We couldn’t care less about your sanctions.” That same year, she attended a Russian national team soccer game in Kazan wearing a t-shirt with the emblem of the “USSR KGB.”
Out on bail
Zarubina was detained on November 21 and released on bail of $25,000. Pending trial, she’s not allowed to contact Russian officials outside the consulate, she surrendered her passport, and she’s confined to New York City. In an interview with RFE/RL, she declined to reveal who paid her bail. “I have a guarantor, like, another person. Not me, of course — it’s a third party,” she said.
Zarubina emphasized that she engaged the FBI voluntarily, telling RFE/RL that she was shocked to face felony charges from the same agents she thought she had been helping for the past four years. “I mean, I know the people who arrested me. And I thought we had a very good relationship, that I was helping them. I even drove myself to the meeting[s] in my car at 8 a.m.” she recalled. Contrary to the FBI’s allegations, Zarubina denies that she ever executed any tasks or assignments from Russia’s intelligence community, partly because there weren’t any, she claims. “They didn’t give me any. They just kept their eye on me,” she told RFE/RL.
However, Zarubina says she now fears she could become a target for Russian intelligence agencies that may not have realized the extent of her conversations with the FBI. For Moscow, her actions might constitute outright treason. “And, of course, it’s not entirely safe for me to stay in New York either,” she said.
If convicted, Nomma Zarubina could face up to five years in prison under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, but she told RFE/RL that she doesn’t worry much about deportation. “I have a daughter; she’s an American citizen,” Zarubina explained. “They’d need really extraordinary circumstances to kick me out. Deportation for providing false testimony? I’ve never heard of that.”
Text by Kevin Rothrock