The Kremlin said Friday that a family of Russian sleeper agents who arrived in Moscow as part of the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were under such tight security that their children only learned they were Russian after the plane took off.
“Before that, they did not know that they were Russian and that they had any connection to our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“And you should have seen when the kids came down the stairs of the plane they discovered they didn’t speak Russian and Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said ‘Buenas noches.'”
Giving new details about the swap and those freed, Peskov confirmed that the killer released by Germany, Vadim Krasikov, was an employee of Russia’s FSB security service and had served in the FSB’s special forces unit, Alpha Group.
Krasikov, who was convicted by a German court of murdering a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park in 2019, was hugged by President Vladimir Putin after he disembarked from a plane in Moscow on Thursday evening.
Krasikov, wearing a baseball cap and tracksuit top, was the first to get off the plane and meet Putin, signalling his importance to Moscow, which prides itself on bringing home intelligence agents arrested abroad.
Those released included so-called “illegal” sleeper agents – the Dultsevs, a husband and wife convicted by a Slovenian court of pretending to be Argentines in order to spy, and who were sent back to Russia with their two children.
Peskov said the couple were given limited access to their children while they were in prison, and they feared they could lose their parental rights.
“The children asked their parents yesterday who was going to meet them (in Moscow). They didn’t even know who Putin was. This is how ‘illegals’ work. They make such sacrifices because of their devotion to their work,” Peskov said.
Peskov said Russian government agencies were working to release other Russians held abroad. He said the swap was negotiated by the FSB and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
He said Putin’s decision to meet them on the plane was “a tribute to those who serve their country and who, after very difficult trials, and thanks to the hard work of many people, have been able to return to the Motherland.”
The trade involved 24 prisoners, of whom 16 moved from Russia to the West and eight prisoners held in the West were sent back to Russia. Those released by Moscow included American journalist Ivan Gershkovich and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who also holds British citizenship.
Although Moscow released more prisoners than it had received, Russian authorities presented it as a victory, and it seemed to have a good effect on the streets of Moscow.
“I’m not remotely political, but any way you look at it: any exchange is wonderful, that our Russian comrades return to the motherland,” Zulfiya said during an interview in the city center.
Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy who is wanted by Britain for the nuclear poison assassination of dissident Alexander Litvinenko and now serves as the head of an ultranationalist party’s faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram: “Our people are at home with their families. And it is not a pity to assign a bunch of foreign agents to each of them.”
Asked whether the prisoner swap was a sign that Russia was ready to compromise on Ukraine, Peskov said these were separate situations and work on a possible diplomatic solution to the “special military operation” being carried out by Russia in Ukraine was being carried out on “different principles.”
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