DISINFO: Spanish journalist Pablo González was arrested without charges as a warning to others
SUMMARY
Pablo González was arrested in Poland because he had two passports, one Russian and one Spanish. But after two and a half years of extension of preventive imprisonment, the Polish justice has been unable to present a formal accusation, so this argument only serves for media intoxication. Some journalists in Spain are accusing Pablo González of being a destabilisation pawn in Poland, due to his articles denouncing the actions of the far-right Polish government at the time. His arrest is therefore a warning for others: [...] NATO partners needed to rewrite recent history in order to justify their actions in Ukraine.
RESPONSE
The allegation that Pablo González was arrested without charges is false. He was charged by Polish authorities with “participation on the activities of a foreign intelligence service” under Article 30, Paragraph 1 of the Polish Criminal Code, although those charges were declared secret under judicial inquiries at the time. His Polish lawyer, Bartosz Rogala, was informed of the charges, as he explained in a TV interview in March 2023.
Besides having a double identity under different names, there is a growing body of incriminating evidence against González, including reports on border crossings and on Russian opposition figures such as Zhanna Nemtsova and Ilya Yashin, as well as messages reclaiming his expenditures to be refunded, which were found on his electronic devices after his arrest. He also took at least two flights with GRU officer Sergei Turbin, purchased simultaneously by the same individual or actor. González’s Polish partner was arrested at the same time as him and remains imprisoned under charges of “accessory to espionage”.
González was included in the prisoner swap that took place on 02 August 2024. Several officials, including Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Medvedev and the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, have celebrated the work of the returnees, and none of them has referred to González’s case as different from the other exchanged Russian operatives.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that there is no evidence that the Russian diplomats expelled from Colombia were spies, that foreign secret services fabricated Russian involvement in Vrbětice explosion, that stories connecting the Skripal poisoning to Russia are pure speculation, or that the EU invented paranoia about Russian spies as EU elections approach.