A Russian woman who claims to have trained as a spy in the same military programme as Vladimir Putin has described how she was taught to 'seduce' her targets.
Born in the USSR, Aliia Roza was expected to follow in the footsteps of her father, a high-ranking military general, and join the military. She went on to undergo training as a spy, allegedly with the same people who trained the Russian president himself, and likened the experience to the 2018 film Red Sparrow.
The film stars Jennifer Lawrence as Dominika Egorova, a former ballerina who enrols in a Russian Intelligence programme and starts using her body as a weapon to entrap a CIA agent.
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When watching such films, Roza has described thinking: "oh my god, how do they know all these things?"
Roza, who is now 37, described her experience in her educational centre where she was taught 'how to seduce men, how to psychologically manipulate them, how to get them to talk so [spies] could hand over information to police'.
For her first task, Roza said she had to pretend she was a sex worker so she could 'go to a club and seduce the leader of a criminal gang which was supplying drugs into the country'.
"It was just crazy," she recalled, "I was hanging out with these baddies who would fight each other and kill each other."
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The target in the mission was a man named Vladimir, and Roza said his gang members 'found out [she] was in the military quite soon'.
She expressed belief the gang members had 'tracked' her, recalling how they put her into a car and dropped her into a dark forest.
"It was so dark, and 10 men started beating me. Vladimir saved me from being killed", she said.
The spy ended up falling in love with the target, and Roza described how Vladimir gave her contacts in Moscow to get in touch with 'in case anything happened to him"'.
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She claimed police started to 'track' her and said Vladimir's friends hid her 'for just under a year', after which things 'were calm enough' for her to start living her life.
Having been forced to move away, Roza later fell in love with a Russian oligarch, who she married in 2006 and became pregnant with. Her husband was later jailed before passing away in prison, and Roza is now determined to make a name for herself in order to show her son that people can change their lives.
She moved to Switzerland and then to London, before moving to settle in the US.
Topics: Russia, Vladimir Putin
Emily Brown