Siberian native Maria Butina said in her first extensive interview after being released from a Florida prison that the feds “created an image of a Kremlin seductress” to charge her with being an unregistered foreign agent.

“I wasn’t even charged with espionage,” the 30-year-old gun rights enthusiast said in an interview with a Russian news outlet.

“I told them that I knew nothing, that they arrested a student. They spent taxpayers’ money on watching me for five years. I just came to study,” she said.

“Ultimately, they had to charge me with at least something. They charged me that I wasn’t registered,” added Butina, who was released back to Moscow last week after serving more than 15 months behind bars for conspiring with her Republican operative boyfriend, Paul Erickson, to cozy up the NRA and promote Russian interests.

Butina, who studied at American University in Washington, had been in custody since her arrest on July 15, 2018. She pleaded guilty in December to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

She was the first Russian citizen convicted of crimes relating to the 2016 election, but her efforts were separate from the sweeping election-meddling outlined by former special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Russian official with whom she conspired was identified as Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of Russia’s central bank. He was never charged in the case, but was slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury Department.

“I’ve always considered Mr. Torshin to be my mentor and probably my grandfather because he always treated me with great respect,” Butina told the interviewer. “We met because we shared some interests in the right to bear arms.”

Butina also blamed her predicament on social networking.

“The first thing that Western schools encourage you to do is what they call social networking, that is, to communicate, socialize, attend events, take photos with famous politicians,” she said. “So what I did was my compulsory activities as a student.”

Butina cited another error on her part that led US intelligence agencies to latch onto her.

“When you move to America, if you move there there’s one rule which I grossly broke,” she said. “One should come there and disown Russia, forget the Russian language, say that it was bad in Russia and praise everything in America.”

The interviewer suggested that Butina also may have attracted unwarranted attention by asking President Trump a question during a public event in 2015 about his views on Russia.

“What a surprise, I asked about Russia. A Russian citizen asked a question about Russia,” she said.

Butina, who was held at the low-security Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution, then slammed the federal prison system as a “complete nightmare.”

“It’s absolutely impossible to get medical assistance there. The majority of women, for example, lack front teeth because they can’t see a dentist. People die there regularly. They procure spoiled food,” she said.

The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post.