A Russian citizen living in Brooklyn is accused of secretly taking orders from her home country’s intelligence apparatus to cultivate relationships with “useful” Americans, such as journalists and military personnel, who could eventually be converted to “the ‘Russian way of thinking.’”
Nomma Zarubina, 34, was recruited in December 2020 by Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, and assigned the codename “Alyssa,” according to a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court. The filing says she initially caught the FBI’s attention after becoming aware of her ties to a suspected Russian spy now on the lam in Moscow. Zarubina allegedly signed a work agreement with the FSB and kept in regular touch with her handler back home, and then lied to FBI agents about that contact. Lying to the FBI is a felony.
In a series of emails on Tuesday, Zarubina told The Independent that her arrest on November 21 came as a surprise. She said she drove to the FBI offices in Lower Manhattan that morning for what she thought was going to be a routine question-and-answer session, which she had been having periodically with a small team of agents over the past four years.
“Like before, I had an appointment with the FBI agents… but their plans were different that day,” Zarubina said. “Why did they decide to arrest me now? It’s a great question.”
She insisted that she “was honest with the FBI, except for two episodes in 2021 and 2023,” saying she was “afraid to declassify the whole story.” Yet, Zarubina claims her “motivation was to get and share the most sensitive and vital information with them.”
“I was helpful to them, and they clearly understood it,” she continued. “But for some reason, they decided to ‘remove’ me after getting maximum information from me. I also believe that the specific time is crucial – the year’s end and the American authorities’ change in January 2025. Probably, we just don’t know what exactly they wanted to get from this case/situation.”
Zarubina was born in the Siberian city of Tomsk, and immigrated to the United States in 2016 after earning a graduate degree at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, according to the complaint. She took a job that September at a Kremlin-backed NGO called the Russia Center New York (RCNY), the complaint states. As revealed in a footnote in the complaint, RCNY chairwoman and alleged Russian intelligence operative Elena Branson was not just Zarubina’s boss, but also the godmother of her young daughter.
Zarubina described Branson to The Independent as “my close friend with whom I spent time, drank coffee, and talked about life, relations between the U.S. and Russia, and private life.”
“She is a woman with an American mentality who still loves her motherland,” she said.
The FBI first approached Zarubina in October 2020, based on her connections with Branson and RCNY, according to the complaint against her.
Zarubina told The Independent she missed the first call from agents, who then phoned back from a private number. She said she “was inquisitive” about what they wanted, and when they asked her to sit for a voluntary interview, she suggested meeting at Tsob-Tsobe, a Turkish spot on Coney Island Avenue. (“They ordered just coffee, nothing else,” Zarubina said.)
There, Zarubina told the agents that she had “a close relationship with Branson,” but insisted that “she had no relationship with Russian security or intelligence services outside of knowing some former classmates in those fields,” according to the complaint.
“Toward the end of the interview, Zarubina asked the agents what type of charges the FBI was considering as to Branson and what capabilities the FBI had to monitor cellular phones,” the complaint states.
Zarubina met with agents again in April 2021, about six months after Branson fled the U.S. for Moscow to avoid arrest. During several subsequent meetings, Zarubina continued to deny any contact with Russian intelligence, according to the complaint. However, it says, she eventually came clean about signing a written cooperation agreement with the FSB, and accepted assignments to cultivate U.S. targets for the agency to exploit.
In one instance, an FSB officer identified in the complaint as “FSB Officer-1” provided Zarubina with a set of names and “instructed [her] to obtain information about those individuals and/or to reach out to them,” it says. FSB Officer-1 also asked Zarubina to identify “potentially helpful contacts… including American… military personnel, and provide contact information for those individuals to FSB Officer-1 so that FSB Officer-1 could come up with reasons to invite those people to Russia to ‘convert’ these contacts to the ‘Russian way of thinking,’” according to the complaint.
A second FSB officer, IDed in the complaint as “FSB Officer-2,” was a friend of Zarubina’s from her university days, the complaint states. She said on Tuesday that their relationship was purely personal, and that she last saw him in Moscow before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“He talked a lot about life, love, and happiness,” Zarubina told The Independent. “I think that workers from security services sometimes think more about love.”
Russian opposition activist Dmitry Valuev has been tracking Zarubina for at least two years, he said on Tuesday. Valuev, who is the president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose activities were last year declared “undesirable” by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, told The Independent that Zarubina’s odd behavior always struck him as suspicious.
Before 2022, Valuev said, Zarubina was an outspoken Putin supporter. Following the opening of the criminal case against Branson, Zarubina abruptly switched sides, becoming vocally anti-Putin, according to Valuev. She reached out to Valuev directly in January 2023, at the same time joining other pro-democracy groups, participating in group chats with members of the opposition, and attending opposition conferences, he said.
Valuev, whose organization was the first to reveal the case against Zarubina, said he shared his research on her with the FBI in hopes of augmenting its official investigation. Much of his intel on Zarubina came from her own social media feeds, according to Valuev, who called her operational security “sloppy.” Unlike Zarubina, Valuev said he was not surprised by news of her arrest.
“Zarubina is not a professional,” Valuev told The Independent. “She is a dilettante recruited by professionals.”
Zarubina is facing two counts of making false statements. Currently free on a $25,000 personal recognizance bond, Zarubina was ordered to turn in her passport, and is forbidden from having any contact with foreign government officials, other than those at the Russian consulate. She is due back in court on December 23.
If convicted, Zarubina faces a maximum total of 10 years in prison.
