Years before being arrested, and before making headlines worldwide, Maria Butina was utterly unknown in the US and Russia. She grew up in Altai Kray, a region nearly 2,000 miles east of Moscow.
She was arrested in 2018 in the United States on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Today, she’s back in Russia — a member of parliament — advocating for people to move there as an alternative to the US.
Irina Borogan, an expert on Russian security services, has followed Butina’s story. She said that Butina proved herself a “gifted girl” who “speaks English brilliantly” and graduated from Altai State University, where she studied political science.
After graduating, Butina “became very close to the Russian politician Alexander Torshin,” Borogan said. “He was a deputy chief of the Russian central bank, a senator and a person quite close to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”
Borogan said Butina worked for Torshin, who promoted her career. She moved to Moscow and worked on advocating for gun rights in Russia, a country with highly restrictive gun laws. Together, as part of that lobbying effort, they developed a network of connections in the US, including with members of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
“I think her goal was to establish an unofficial relationship with American politicians, with influential Republicans, with businessmen in the NRA,” Borogan explained. The idea was “to promote the Russian agenda in [President Donald] Trump’s or Republican circles.”
Borogan said that Butina was successful in establishing those connections. She posted dozens of photos of herself posing with influential American politicians. In 2015, Butina attended the annual Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, where then-candidate Trump was a featured speaker.
At the event, Butina asked Trump a question: “If you will be elected as the president, what will be your foreign politics, especially in relation to my country, and do you want to continue the politics of sanctions that are damaging of both [the] economy, or do you have any other ideas?”
In his response, Trump expressed a desire to improve US-Russia relations. He said: “I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin. And I mean where we have the strength, I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”
The FBI began investigating Butina’s activities during her time in the US. She was arrested in the summer of 2018. Ultimately, Butina was sentenced for not registering as a foreign agent. Her lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said that despite the media portrayal of Butina as a spy, it was clear to him that this was never true.
“I think there was a bit of a ‘Red Scare’ going on at the time,” Driscoll said. “I suspect that FBI Counterintelligence and the US attorney’s office in DC [were] probably eager to find a Russia-related case, given that they didn’t have the main Russia-related case everyone was talking about on the news, which was the [Robert] Mueller investigation.”
Driscoll said that Butina was trying to make a career in politics, acting as a bridge between the US and Russia. But because of the political climate at the time, her actions were interpreted as nefarious.
“People, I think, thought that where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Driscoll said. “Now, of course, from an espionage standpoint, it would make no sense because most Russian spies don’t post their every move on Instagram, nor do they communicate via Twitter direct message with their handler.”
Despite the lack of evidence, Olga Lautman, a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis, still believes Butina was a Russian agent.
“My opinion is she was not a free agent; she was given specific names, organizations, politicians, to approach,” Lautman said. “Interestingly enough, a former KGB agent years ago had told me that the best operations are the ones that fall right under the criminal threshold.”
Lautman said that Russian intelligence operations these days take different forms and that not all of them are done in the shadows. “Everything is public. They don’t try to hide it,” she said. “I think the more [publicly] it’s done, the more it feels as if there’s no operation going on because surely if something was happening people would try to hide it.”
In October 2019, Butina was deported back to Russia. Since then, her career has flourished. She often appears on state TV, talking about US politics. In 2021, she was elected to the State Duma as a member of Putin’s United Russia party.
Most recently, she’s launched a project called “Welcome to Russia,” which encourages foreigners to move to Russia. She often posts about it on social media.
“Butina’s idea is to invite conservative Western people to Russia,” Borogan explained. “People who share Russian moral and spiritual values. People who are as they call them ‘anti-liberal, they are anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ,’ and don’t like the Western gender policy.”
Borogan said that this is an attempt to present Russia as an alternative to the “immoral and liberal West.” That’s something that Butina often talks about in public appearances.
In a recent interview with Al Arabiya, Butina said, “The LGBT in Russia is banned, absolutely. The whole movement can’t propagate; you cannot go in the streets and do parades because — and we are very proud of that. We are very proud that we have God in our constitution. We are very proud that we have mother and father in our constitution.”
These kinds of statements are part of the “traditional values” agenda that Putin has promoted for years. Butina’s anti-Western message is much broader, touching on the war in Ukraine and NATO. Butina told Al Arabiya, “We have to be close to each other to stand against NATO. That’s not a secret anymore, there is [not] just Ukraine, this is now NATO fighting [through] Ukrainian lives.”
The topic that comes up the most in Butina’s interviews is her arrest and her time in prison. She talks about the broken US justice system and how the US isn’t the traditional flourishing country it used to be.
“When I came to the States, I expected the American dream to be like we saw in Hollywood movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Butina said. “I expected conservative America, and I expected people who just, you know, have a wonderful yard and they have wonderful families, and America has none of that. Like not anymore. Like they lost the country, and now I see all that here in Russia.”
Butina’s message of a declining US and a prosperous Russia doesn’t resonate with most Americans. Inside Russia, though, Butina has a receptive audience that doesn’t see her as a foreign agent but rather as someone wronged by the US, a patriot and, most importantly, a loyal supporter of Putin.