Nomma Zarubina, a 35-year-old Russian native living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, pleaded guilty on Thursday to two counts of making false statements: one for lying to the FBI about her contacts with Kremlin spies, and another for falsely claiming on a naturalization application that she had no involvement in prostitution.
She faces up to 10 years in prison at her sentencing on June 11. She is expected to be deported as a result of the felony conviction.
The case reads less like a spy thriller and more like a courtroom sitcom written by someone with no sense of self-preservation.
Zarubina didn't go quietly. According to a federal complaint reported by the New York Post, she confessed during meetings with the FBI in June and July 2024 that she had been working for the Kremlin since December 2020 under the code name "Alyssa." But her relationship with federal law enforcement didn't end at the interview table.
She developed what can only be described as an obsessive fixation on an FBI agent involved in her case. At 4:17 a.m. one day last September, she texted the agent:
"Catch me baby."
She followed that up with another message declaring herself "sooooo bad." When the agent didn't reply, she told him she loved him. Then she called him a "b—h." A judge repeatedly warned her to stop texting the agent. She did not stop. During a single night in November 2025, she messaged him 65 more times.
Judge Laura Swain eventually ruled that Zarubina had breached the conditions of her release on $20,000 bond, citing her continued drinking and her pattern of harassing the agent despite repeated warnings. Zarubina landed behind bars in December.
Judge Swain addressed her directly from the bench:
"I hear the pain that you're in, and I hear the trouble and the conflict that's led us here today, but you're not helping yourself. You're not stopping this conduct."
That is a federal judge exercising extraordinary patience with a defendant who treated her bail conditions like suggestions.
The FBI first met with Zarubina in October 2020 as part of a probe into her close friend Elena Branson, who was associated with an organization called the Russian Center New York. Branson was indicted in 2022 for allegedly spreading Russian foreign influence through that organization. She fled to Moscow during the probe and is still at large.
During interviews in 2021, 2022, and 2023, Zarubina denied having any contact with Russian spy agents. Court papers show she maintained those denials across multiple years of federal interviews. She only came clean during meetings in June and July 2024, when she admitted to working under a Kremlin code name for nearly four years.
She also name-dropped Maria Butina in her communications, texting that she guessed "Butina got more attention." Butina is an admitted Russian agent who served 15 months in prison for infiltrating conservative networks to influence U.S. Republican politics. The comparison was Zarubina's, not the government's, and it tells you something about how she viewed her own situation.
Federal prosecutors in April 2025 accused Zarubina of participating in a scheme to transport women to engage in prostitution connected to an unidentified massage parlor in East Brunswick, New Jersey. This was the basis for the second false statement charge: she lied on her naturalization application about any involvement in prostitution.
Zarubina told the judge that the FBI agent had "influenced" her emotionally, saying her life "became so different" after meeting him and that he "controlled me emotionally." She also offered a rather telling assessment of American law enforcement:
"They frame people, they build cases, you know."
She said she understood communicating with the FBI because "they actually work the same as Russians work." The woman who spent years lying to federal agents about her Kremlin ties now wants sympathy for being caught.
Dmitry Valuev, president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, said his organization had flagged Zarubina as suspicious for years before her arrest. They had tracked her work for what Valuev called a "shady Russian nonprofit" serving as its representative to the United Nations.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Zarubina had a friend indicted for Russian influence operations who fled the country. She was flagged by a watchdog organization. She lied to federal investigators for three consecutive years. And when the walls finally closed in, she responded by bombarding an FBI agent with late-night texts and comparing herself to a convicted Russian spy.
The spectacle of Zarubina's behavior, the 4 a.m. texts, the defiant messages, the courtroom theatrics, can obscure the more serious reality underneath. A foreign national operated under a Kremlin code name on American soil for years. She lied to the FBI repeatedly. She was tied to both a Russian influence network and a prostitution ring. And she managed to do all of this while living in Brooklyn and apparently interacting with the United Nations.
This is the kind of case that should prompt uncomfortable questions about how many others are operating in plain sight. Zarubina wasn't exactly subtle. She wasn't a master of tradecraft. She was eventually undone by her own inability to stop texting a federal agent in the middle of the night.
The ones who know how to stay quiet are the ones who should worry us.
Zarubina now sits behind bars, awaiting sentencing, expected to be deported after a felony conviction. She told the court her life "seems like a tragedy" because people from many countries think she was a spy, but "don't know the whole story."
A federal jury won't need the whole story. The guilty plea told it.
