Former member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot Rita Flores, whose real name is Margarita Konovalova, said that for about three years she was forced to cooperate with Russia's Federal Security Service and collect information on anti-war activists and contemporary artists. According to her, the FSB even tried to use her in a plot to kidnap and kill exiled Pyotr Verzilov, writes the opposition publication Moscow Times.
Flores says she was recruited after a search of her Moscow apartment on February 17, 2023. At that time, FSB officers threatened her with criminal prosecution for social media posts related to alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, as well as with the murder of her relatives if she refused to cooperate.
She says the officers forced her to sign a cooperation agreement and gave her the operational nickname "Harley". She was given a special phone and trained to act as an agent. Her main task was to compile detailed profiles of artists and political activists, including information about their relatives, habits, and vulnerabilities.
Flores claims that among the people the FSB assigned her to monitor were street artist Philip Kozlov, known as Philippenzo, activist Pavel Krisevich, and Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina. According to her, she tried to deliberately sabotage her tasks, including by simulating conflicts with the targeted individuals in order to delay action against them.
From the beginning of 2024 until June, she received 50,000 rubles a month from her curators, after an initial payment of 30,000 rubles, the activist says.
The most serious task that Flores says she was given came in the summer of 2025. Then the FSB asked her to help kidnap and kill the former publisher of "Mediazon" and former Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov, with whom she had previously had a relationship.
The plan called for Flores to lure Verzilov to a cafe in Serbia, where FSB officers and people associated with them would be waiting for him. She was then supposed to leave the establishment under some pretext, and Verzilov was to be kidnapped and killed, she claims. She was offered between 1 and 3 million rubles for her participation in the operation.
Flores says that this task was the "point of no return" for her. She refused to participate, began to delay the execution, and sought help from lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov. She later managed to leave Russia and terminate her cooperation with the FSB.
An independent verification of all of Flores's claims is currently not possible. "Moscow Times" explicitly notes that he was unable to independently verify her account.
Pavel Krisevich, one of the activists Flores claims she was gathering information about, said after the publication that he only learned about it from her interview and called for the case to be viewed with understanding towards people forced to act under pressure.