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A United States District Judge in Manhattan sent a Russian woman behind bars for 14 months after she pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about her ties to Russia's premier intelligence agency, the FSB, and to naturalization fraud linked to the interstate transport of women for prostitution.
Case documents made public last week illustrated that prosecutors wanted the judge to impose a harsher penalty—between 18 to 24 months—on 35-year-old Nomma Zarubina, who previously insisted when entering her guilty plea that she had actually assisted the FBI and shared information with the CIA.
"The defendant lied to the FBI in connection with a sensitive investigation into malign foreign influence," prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. "She helped run a prostitution business over the course of several years. She intentionally omitted her participation in that criminal enterprise on her naturalization application in an effort to obtain United States citizenship. And then, after being arrested and released on bail, she repeatedly taunted, harassed, and threatened Case Agent-1."
Zarubina was jailed in December for cyber-stalking the investigator and a government-appointed defense attorney had asked that she be credited for her time behind bars and let go. The judge dismissed that request.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain revoked her bail late last year following Zarubina's repeated refusal to stop contacting the FBI case agent who was expected to be a witness in her prosecution.
The prosecution's memorandum also explicitly detailed the origins of the government's interest in Zarubina.
The FBI began investigating her in 2020 because they were scrutinizing her employer, Elena Branson, a U.S.-Russian dual national. Branson, who fled the United States for Russia in 2020 after the FBI searched her Manhattan apartment, was indicted in 2022 on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government. She remains a fugitive.
Prosecutors allege that Branson’s organization, the Russian Center New York, functioned as a propaganda arm for the Kremlin. Zarubina served as a policy advisor for the center and maintained its website.
While many of the documents in the case remain classified, the sentencing memo provided rare detail into the broader malign-influence probe. Prosecutors noted that, at the behest of her FSB handlers—who assigned her the codename "Alyssa" - Zarubina attended the 2021 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia. Her objective, the government said, was "to help identify journalists who would be willing to provide positive coverage of the event and of Russia more generally." The government's memorandum included two photographs of Zarubina posing alongside individuals that prosecutors identified as intelligence targets.
