Pussy Riot Member Admits She Was Recruited by FSB, Says Agents Threatened to Kill Her Family

Margarita Floresova (real name Margarita Konovalova), a member of the punk group Pussy Riot, has revealed that Russia's FSB recruited her in 2023 by threatening to kill her relatives, and later ordered her to lure well-known activist Pyotr Verzilov into a trap. The news was reported by Novaya Gazeta, citing an interview the performer gave to Port magazine.

Floresova said the recruitment took place in an atmosphere of intimidation: "It was exactly like in a film: they sat me down at a table, I wasn't allowed to move, I wasn't allowed to look away." She was threatened with harm to her family and told she would never be able to prove who had killed her mother. The activist was given the operational codename "Harley" and a separate phone to communicate with her FSB handler.

The task: gather compromising material and set a trap

According to Floresova, she was ordered to collect information on people of interest to the security services — their contacts, habits and vulnerabilities — but she deliberately tried to sabotage these assignments. In 2025, she claims, the FSB instructed her to help lure Pyotr Verzilov to Serbia: she was supposed to meet him at a café and then leave under some pretext, after which he was to be kidnapped and killed. She was promised three million rubles — more than 743,000 crowns — for taking part in the operation.

Floresova says she told her lawyer what was happening, and he helped her leave Russia. According to Novaya Gazeta, she fled the country ten days ago.

Who is Verzilov, and why is he an FSB target?

Pyotr Verzilov is a prominent figure in Russia's protest and art movements, a member of Pussy Riot and former publisher of the Mediazona news outlet. In 2018 he was suddenly hospitalized in Moscow, and after being transferred to Berlin, doctors determined he had likely been poisoned. Verzilov has lived outside Russia since 2020; a year later, authorities added him to the register of "foreign agents," and later to the list of terrorists and extremists.

During Russia's war against Ukraine, Verzilov wrote on social media about the killing of civilians in Bucha, blaming Russian troops — a statement that led to a criminal case against him in Russia for spreading "knowingly false information" about the army. According to Floresova, it was within the framework of the investigation targeting Verzilov that Russian security forces searched her apartment, and later recruited her in 2023. The performer and activist has previously been detained several times for her protest activities.

Source: novinky.cz