A former member of the protest-art collective Pussy Riot says she was recruited by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to help spy on the Kremlin’s critics. Rita Flores, whose real name is Margarita Konovalova, sat down in an interview with her lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov posted on the YouTube channel of Port Media, an outlet created in July 2024 by a group of exiled Russian journalists.
In 2020, she was jailed for taking part in an anti-police brutality protest near the Kremlin with Pussy Riot, clad in their synonymous pink balaclavas. Konovalova says she started working for the FSB in 2023 after intense pressure from the government agency and threats to kill her family. As an agent, she was trained on passing information on artists, anti-war activists and curating a list of contemporary artists in Russia and neighboring countries. Her main duties were to report any works of art that painted Russia in an unforgiving light. “So, if I see shitty [in the FSB’s opinion] art that insults the Motherland, I have to call and say ‘lock him up!’ and we start working on it,” said Konovalova.
When Konovalova started working with the FSB, she received a one-off payment of 30,000 Russian Rubles (approximately $350), and it was only in recent months that she started receiving a regular payment on the 15th of every month of 50,000 Russian Rubles (approximately $593). She last received payment in June.
Konovalova’s FSB handlers had handpicked some of her targets to keep a watchful eye on; they included street artist Philipp Kozlov, otherwise known as Philippenzo; performance artist Pavel Krisevich; and Pyotr Verzilov, Konovalova’s former boyfriend and former publisher of Mediazona and a member of the art groups Voina and Pussy Riot.
She says that the information she relayed back to the FSB was always “stupid and pointless things,” such as where Philippenzo goes after his workshop, where he eats noodles, and what kind of beer he drinks. In a meeting she had with the artist in the summer of 2023, he revealed to her that he was working on a graffiti mural titled Rape. She tried to talk him out of it, fearing the consequences. Konovalova’s handler had told her that there were “two options: we’ll put him in jail for this, give him a hard time, a proper sentence, no fine or a year will do, it’ll be a normal sentence, or, if you can, you’ll get him out of here as soon as possible.”
Philippenzo was eventually detained at Domodedovo Airport and sentenced twice before immigrating to Lithuania.
In Krisevich’s case, Konovalova repeatedly quarreled with the artist and his wife until the couple ultimately escaped Russia in December 2025.
The FSB’s primary target was Verzilov. They wanted her to seduce Verzilov into coming to Serbia to meet at a café filled with FSB officers who would kidnap and kill him. Konovalova was offered 1 to 3 million Russian Rubles (approximately $11,000 to $35,000) for the mission, but she delayed it by confessing everything to her boyfriend and marrying him to stop the operation.
After the interview was published, Konovalova took to Instagram to say she’s been “safe for a week now” and is finally ready to share her story. “A lot happened behind the scenes—things that were excessively dramatic and dark—such as years of prolonged depression, constant and unrelenting derealization, PTSD from being under surveillance (yes, 2020 and 2021 turned out to be a walk in the park by comparison), several suicide attempts, and so much more,” she added.
