Oihana Goiriena, the partner of journalist Pablo González who was in pretrial detention in Poland since February 2022 accused of being a Russian spy, has spoken on ‘Espejo Público’ after learning of the journalist’s release after two and a half years in prison. González was released this Thursday and transferred to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange of journalists between Russia and Poland. The journalist was detained on February 28, 2022, in Poland while covering the exodus of refugees at the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
“It was a surprise for me too, I had no idea. You said that there have been months of negotiations and I received it yesterday like everyone else. I’m still not fully settled, I can’t believe it, and until I hear his voice, I won’t truly believe it,” she said.
“I haven’t been able to talk to him yet. His lawyer told me that the doctors will see him first, and I suppose after that, he will call home,” she added. Goiriena explained how she found out the news after fighting for so long for her partner’s release. “His lawyer gave me the news. He wrote to me, didn’t call me, and said ‘Oihana, be attentive, but calm, this will happen’ and sent me the press release that would later be published,” she recalls.
Regarding Pablo González’s whereabouts, she indicates that she believes “he is in Moscow, but I can’t say for sure” and that “the next step I understand is to go to Spain after two and a half years without seeing his entire family.”
“It has been two years of total uncertainty”
“These two years have been long and hard. Long mostly because there were no advances and because communication with him was impossible. I remember he spent two years in isolation, and they never allowed us to talk to him on the phone at any time and only authorized us three visits in two and a half years. So it has been two years of total uncertainty, and the accusation was there without any evidence being presented. The only thing we knew is that pretrial detention in Poland has no legal limits and they could keep him like that for as long as they wanted, and in fact, we were able to ascertain that they had no intention of bringing him to trial. It has been very hard not to have anything to hold on to; that has been the hardest part,” she recalls.
During the time he was in prison, she explains that she could only see him three times. “When we first saw him, he was upbeat and said ‘this will be resolved soon,’ and he didn’t know they had no intention of resolving it. The second time was harder; I saw him very angry, saying ‘what am I doing here?’ and in the third visit, I saw him more stable, and that he hadn’t had ups and downs in the last months, and I saw him calmer,” she states.
Now she just hopes that the journalist comes home. “When he is home, the first thing we will do is prepare a good dinner or a good meal because he has lost a lot of weight and will be eager to eat properly,” she says. “They had him on a vegetarian diet because often the meat or cold cuts that entered the normal diet came in bad condition,” she concludes.