Rita Flores, a former member of the punk collective Pussy Riot whose actual title is Margarita Konovalova, claimed in a video interview posted on YouTube on Monday (24 August) that Russia’s FSB safety service had pressured her to work for the company beginning in 2023.
The interview, printed by Port Media, a website created by Russian journalists compelled into exile, illustrates how president Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to intimidate artists because it continues its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth yr. Flores mentioned that brokers threatened to kill her household and organize her compelled disappearance whereas looking her condo and seizing her phone and laptop computer, pressuring her to report on different up to date artists.
“It was identical to within the motion pictures: we sat down on the desk, and I wasn’t allowed to maneuver or look away,” she advised Port Media. “They began making an attempt to recruit me, resorting to all types of threats and mockery, saying really nasty issues, threatening to kill my household, and claiming I’d by no means have the ability to show who killed my mom. They received private, calling me vile and horrible names, and saying they’d flip me into the last word Devil of all Russia.”
Flores says she was threatened with prosecution for social media posts in regards to the Russian bloodbath of civilians in Bucha, close to Kyiv, within the early days of the invasion. She had already been jailed in 2021, when Pussy Riot members confronted a number of arrests for talking out towards the Putin regime.
Within the wide-ranging interview, performed by her lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, in an unnamed location, Flores described operations that the FSB began towards the road artist Philippenzo (actual title Filipp Kozlov) and the efficiency artist Pavel Krisevich. She claimed she instigated arguments with them to keep away from finishing her FSB assignments, a tactic she says she used with different artists as properly. Philippenzo was compelled to flee Russia in 2023, when he was dealing with as much as three years in jail for anti-war graffiti depicting a mix of the phrases for “Russia” and “rape”. Krisevich fled Russia in late 2025 after serving three and a half years in jail and being re-arrested a number of occasions.
In a subsequent submit on Instagram, Flores thanked Zakhvatov and Leonid Nevzlin, an exiled Russian Israeli businessman who funds anti-Putin activists, for saving her life by spiriting her out of Russia to security. She wrote that she had tried suicide a number of occasions. She directed others who’ve been recruited and need to get out to a Telegram channel with directions from Zakhvatov on the right way to get assist. Zakhvatov, who defended Pussy Riot members, together with Flores, in Russia in 2020-21, was sentenced in absentiaby a Russian army courtroom to 21 years in jail for supporting Ukraine’s army. He was declared a “international agent” by Russia’s justice ministry in 2025.
Within the interview, Flores claimed the FSB had assigned her to lure Pyotr Verzilov, a founding member of Pussy Riot, to Serbia, the place Russian brokers would kidnap and kill him, providing her as much as 3m rubles (round $36,000). She mentioned she contacted Zakhvatov after that to hunt a manner out. Verzilov has been formally labelled a terrorist in Russia for becoming a member of Ukraine’s army.
In response to Flores’s interview, Philippenzo posted a Fb message accompanied by a 2017 portray that was seized by the FSB throughout a 2023 search of his house and studio. “It depicts the FSB emblem—a double-headed eagle, a protect and a sword—symbols of omnipotent, covert authority and management,” he wrote. “Nonetheless, the ribbon bears an ironic slogan that lays naked a paradox: an organisation that has spent a long time cultivating the picture of an omnipotent entity more and more demonstrates systemic failure in apply.”
