How An Accused Russian Spy Traversed Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian Politics as a Journalist

Polish prosecutors last week formally indicted Gonzalez, 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 Sahakyan, 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,” Sahakyan 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,” Shahverdyan, 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.

Shahverdyan 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,” Shahverdyan said. “We appreciated his resilience a lot.”

Shahverdyan 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,” Shahverdyan said.

A profile of Gonzalez by US-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 Sahakyan 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, Sahakyan recalled. He spoke with Sahakyan 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 Pashinyan 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 Pashinyan’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,” Pashinyan said. “We see these mediation efforts for establishing stability in the region and achieving a peaceful resolution.”

Gonzalez also asked Pashinyan 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 Pashinyan 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 Pashinyan’s resignation. Gonzalez covered Armenia’s political landscape at the time, taking photographs in the offices of Pashinyan’s ruling Civil Contract party and attending a press conference held by the country’s second president, Robert Kocharyan.

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.