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.