YEREVAN — Following a historic prisoner swap between Russia and the West this month, Armine, an ethnic Armenian displaced from the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, watched footage of the exchanged Russians disembarking from their plane and being greeted on the tarmac by Russian President Vladimir Putin — rewinding and replaying it in disbelief.

Among those returning home were convicted Russian spies and one convicted assassin. But Armine, whom RFE/RL is identifying with a pseudonym due to security concerns, recognized another one: a Spanish journalist who had been a frequent visitor to Nagorno-Karabakh — particularly during times of escalating tensions there.

“I met Pablo about 10 years ago…. He introduced himself as a Spanish journalist and was eager to interview Karabakh officials, visit the seven districts around Karabakh, and talk to the locals,” Armine told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

“He made many contacts in Karabakh and was warmly received. Strangely enough, the Karabakh authorities — who were typically suspicious of outsiders — had no doubts about Pablo,” she added.

The man Armine recognized is Pablo Gonzalez, Spanish-Russian freelance journalist who is identified in his Russian passport as Pavel Rubtsov. He was arrested in Poland in 2022 on charges of spying for Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU.

Armine is one of more than a dozen people who spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service about their encounters with Gonzalez in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was a predominantly ethnic Armenian region before it was recaptured by Azerbaijan after the attack on September 19, 2023.

Most said they found nothing suspicious about the visitor, who in addition to reporting about hostilities in the region wrote about Armenia’s nuclear power plant and used his status as a journalist to interview Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and snap photographs inside the ruling Civil Contract party headquarters.

They did note that Gonzalez, 42, demonstrated an appetite for covering conflict.

“He was not afraid of war at all,” said Sergey Shahverdian, the former director of Stepanakert’s Hotel Europe, where Gonzalez stayed.

Just days after Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Polish authorities arrested Gonzalez in the border town of Przemysl, through which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war have passed.

Following the arrest, Poland’s counterintelligence agency alleged Gonzalez had “carried out his activities for Russia using his journalistic status.” Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s MI6 foreign spy service, said later in 2022 that Gonzales was a deep-cover spy who was “trying to go into Ukraine to be part of their destabilizing efforts there.”

Polish prosecutors last week formally indictedGonzalez, accusing him of supplying the GRU with information that was potentially “harmful” to Poland and NATO, though after the prisoner swap he is now beyond Warsaw’s reach.

While Polish authorities have not officially disclosed further details, journalistic investigations have previously found that Gonzalez had ingratiated himself with Russian opposition activists and compiled reports on them.

Karo Sahakian, an Armenian photographer who says he first met Gonzalez during the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that he “didn’t notice anything suspicious” about him.

“I’m still not 100 percent sure,” Sahakian said.

‘He Did Not Hide’ 

During the 2020 war, Gonzalez checked into the Hotel Europe in Stepanakert — now called Xankendi under Azerbaijani rule — several hundred miles from what would later become the Russian-Ukrainian front.

“You couldn’t mistake him for anyone else,” Shahverdian, the former director of the hotel who was displaced from the region along with tens of thousands of other ethnic Armenians, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

Shahverdian says Gonzalez registered locally as a Spanish citizen and an independent journalist, and that unlike many journalists he would rush to the battlefronts like a trained soldier.

“He did not hide in bomb shelters or fear bombings,” Shahverdian said. “We appreciated his resilience a lot.”

Shahverdian noted that the alleged spy “spoke Russian very well.”

“He would explain that he was born and raised in Russia, and that his grandparents were communists,” Shahverdian said.

A profile of Gonzalez by U.S.-funded broadcaster VOA, for which he had contributed reporting as a freelancer, cited his wife and a friend as saying that his late grandfather, Andres Gonzalez, fled with his family as a child from Spain to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Spain with his mother at age 9, VOA reported.

Both Armenian and foreign journalists who knew Gonzalez described him as cheerful, humorous, and quick to make friends — a person who loved noisy gatherings where he often showed off his tattoos.

“He had a tattoo of Tatik-Papik (“Grandmother and Grandfather”), a statue widely regarded as a symbol of Karabakh,” the photographer Sahakian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “He would say that the Karabakh war was close to his heart, which is why he got the tattoo.”

Gonzalez introduced himself as Basque and an independent journalist, Sahakian recalled. He spoke with Sahakian only in English and worked alone, never with accompaniment, the photographer added.

Probing Armenian Domestic Politics 

Gonzalez also took a keen interest in Armenia’s domestic political affairs, particularly in Yerevan’s relations with its neighbors.

During the 2020 war, he managed to secure an interview with Pashinian on behalf of the Spanish news agency EFE — Gonzalez’s only known face-to-face interview with a head of government.

According to a transcript of the October 2020 interview released by Pashinian’s office, Gonzalez asked him about the course of the war and whether Moscow was doing everything it could to fulfill its obligations under its strategic alliance with Yerevan.

“We do feel Russia’s support as a strategic partner of Armenia, and we do feel Russia’s mediation efforts,” Pashinian said. “We see these mediation efforts for establishing stability in the region and achieving a peaceful resolution.”

Gonzalez also asked Pashinian why Russian border guards had been deployed along the border between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, according to reports published by Russian state media outlets.

His questioning of Pashinian on that issue was not included in either the EFE report or in the transcript released by the Armenian leader’s office.

Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti noted the absence of this part of the interview in the official transcript and the EFE report, explaining that Gonzalez had shown its reporter this part of the interview.

A year after the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, Gonzalez wrote about the conflict on his Spanish-language website, and he continued to visit Armenia, including during the 2021 snap parliamentary elections.

Following the war, the Armenian opposition along with high-ranking military officials demanded Pashinian’s resignation. Gonzalez covered Armenia’s political landscape at the time, taking photographs in the offices of Pashinian’s ruling Civil Contract party and attending a press conference held by the country’s second president, Robert Kocharian.

RFE/RL’s Armenian Service spoke with people both from the pro-government and opposition circles about Gonzalez, but in stark contrast to those he encountered in Nagorno-Karabakh, none seems to remember him.

During this period, Gonzalez also focused on another issue of strategic importance: Armenia’s Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant and its energy cooperation with Russia.

On his Spanish-language website, Gonzalez published an article featuring information about the nuclear power plant’s location, the capacity of its reactors, the number of reactors in operation, and Russian fuel supplies for the facility.

The article also addressed whether Armenia would build a new nuclear power plant and, if so, whether Yerevan would award the contract to Russia once again.

Getting ‘Back To Work’ 

After Gonzalez descended onto the tarmac following the August 1 prisoner exchange, Putin greeted him on a red carpet with a warm handshake. His fellow returnees included Vadim Krasikov, a former Russian FSB officer convicted of the 2019 murder of ex-Chechen field commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin.

Gonzalez was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt that read: “Your Empire Needs You.”

“I would like to address those of you who have a direct connection to military service. I want to thank you for your loyalty to your oath and your duty to your Motherland, which has never forgotten you for a moment,” Putin told the group.

The following day, Putin’s head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, said Russia had “welcomed our colleagues on home soil.”

“They will rest a little now and get back to work,” Naryshkin said.