5 April, 20:37
While readers of Delfi were absorbing the story of a Russian spy who fell in love with a Ukrainian counterintelligence officer — eight months of secret operation, romantic entrapment, intelligence extracted through intimacy — both protagonists of this story were, in fact, demonstrating in real time precisely why neither of them belongs in any spy thriller.
One was sending drunk texts to an FBI agent at four in the morning. The other was giving interviews about her own heroism to anyone willing to print them.
Welcome to the actual story.
The FSB's Most Expensive Bureaucratic Exercise
Nomma Zarubina from Tomsk — a graduate of RANEPA and St. Petersburg State University, specialization: international relations and national security — was recruited by the FSB in 2020, given the code name "Alyssa," a list of names from American think tanks, and an assignment to cultivate contacts. Standard soft-power template: conferences, networking, reporting back. Her FSB handler maintained communication through encrypted messengers, periodically sending photographs of his newly acquired colonel's epaulettes — and, according to case materials, nude selfies. Apparently that passed for tradecraft in Tomsk.
Between 2018 and 2024, she also organized the transportation of women between New York and New Jersey for work at a massage parlor in East Brunswick, New Jersey. This ran concurrently with the conference circuit.
This is not an intelligence operation. This is a budget scheme — the kind where regional FSB officers report a "valuable asset in the United States" to justify funding, collect bonuses and promotions, the asset sends photographs from panels and receptions, and everyone considers the arrangement mutually satisfactory.
The FBI encountered her not because she was dangerous, but because it was already investigating her employer, Elena Branson — head of the Russian Center New York, indicted in 2022 as an unregistered foreign agent. Zarubina gave testimony, handed over her handlers' contacts, made bail — and immediately began flooding the lead FBI agent on her case with intoxicated messages at four in the morning, alternating romantic overtures with conspiratorial threats. The court issued warnings. Twice. The third time, it revoked her bail. At the final hearing, she produced a box of chocolates from her bag and informed the court that this was the entirety of what she had received from the FBI in exchange for years of cooperation.
In February 2026, she pleaded guilty on two counts: making false statements to the FBI and naturalization fraud. Sentencing: June 2026.
The Counterintelligence Officer Who Wasn't
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, 47, Las Vegas — a transgender woman, former political operative, freelance journalist. The biography alone is enough to give any editor pause: in 2020–2021, she worked inside Nevada Republican structures under an assumed persona, cultivating ties with the Proud Boys while simultaneously conducting what she described as opposition research for a book on extremism. Then she went public with everything. In March 2022, she arrived in Ukraine as a war correspondent, stayed, became a combat medic, and eventually an English-language spokesperson for the Territorial Defense Forces. In September 2023, she posted a video promising that Russian propagandists would be "hunted down" and "justice served." The Ukrainian military suspended her immediately — for statements made without authorization from the command. By February 2025, she was discharged entirely. A Russian puppet court in the so-called "DNR" sentenced her in absentia to twenty years.
No counterintelligence. No official intelligence role. A volunteer with theatrical instincts, shown the door by a professional army that had other things to worry about.
The two of them met in New York in the spring of 2025. Zarubina was on bail at the time, awaiting trial, and simultaneously harassing an FBI agent with late-night messages. The conditions were not exactly ideal for a precision intelligence operation.
The Story That Tells Itself
What happened next exists entirely as told by Ashton-Cirillo herself, in an interview published on Substack after Zarubina had already pleaded guilty. By her account, the operation was planned, the relationship deliberate, and the intelligence extracted. "When I transferred from the Territorial Defense Forces to the Main Intelligence Directorate, I was able to significantly expand my contacts with Russian influencers, operatives, and assets," she told the interviewer. Zarubina, she says, initiated contact in early spring 2025 — "by April she was expressing romantic interest and proposing that we meet in person" — and became the target, not the hunter.
Eight months of relationship. Video calls with Zarubina's parents. Substantial intelligence gathered. The sequence of events, she adds, speaks for itself.
Delfi accepted this account without qualification and added its own flourish: that Zarubina had been instructed by the FSB to "enter into intimate relations with people" as part of her operational work. This claim does not appear anywhere in the indictment, the court record, or the guilty plea. What the documents show is FSB contact, false testimony, and a massage parlor in New Jersey.
As for the "counterintelligence" operation — there is no independent confirmation that the GUR sanctioned or supervised anything involving Ashton-Cirillo. The "United Front of Resistance," in whose name she says she acted, is a self-described clandestine anti-Kremlin organization that issues its own press releases about materials transferred to the SBU. The SBU has not confirmed this publicly.
None of which means the meeting did not happen, or that no information changed hands. It means there is a significant distance between what the documents establish and what one of the participants is telling journalists about herself.
The Market That War Creates
The documented facts are these: Zarubina was an FSB asset, lied to the FBI, organized prostitution, pleaded guilty, and goes to prison. Everything else — the "operation," the "honeypot reversal," the "counterintelligence officer" — is a narrative constructed after the fact by someone with an evident interest in that narrative, amplified by tabloids with an evident interest in clicks.
War creates a market for a particular type of person: someone who needs a role, a story, and an audience. The FSB provided one of them with a role she was temperamentally unfit to play. The other wrote her own role and found publications happy to stage it.
Real intelligence officers do not work this way. And they do not give interviews describing how they did it.