The children of a couple of Russian spies who returned home on Thursday after the biggest prisoner exchange between the West and Russia since the Cold War only discovered their nationality on the flight to Moscow.
Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva posed as an Argentine couple living in Slovenia when they were arrested there.
Their children don’t speak a word of Russian and didn’t know who President Vladimir Putin went, asking the parents who was greeting them upon arrival, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov he said.
In total, 24 people arrested in seven different countries were exchanged on Thursday.
Sixteen were Western prisoners held in Russian prisons and eight were Russian prisoners held in the US, Norway, Germany, Poland and Slovenia. Among them was Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
The Russian family of four was warmly welcomed, with Ms. Dultseva and her daughter receiving flowers and a warm hug from President Putin.
“Buenas noches,” the president said to the spies’ children, as he greeted them in Spanish.
As reported by Argentine media, the couple were known as María Mayer and Ludwig Gisch and arrived in Slovenia with an Argentine passport in 2017.
The husband created a start-up IT company under his pseudonym and the wife ran an online art gallery.
The family used Ljubljana as a base and it was only in 2022 that the couple were arrested by Slovenian police on charges of espionage.
Before the large-scale prisoner exchange, Dultsev and Ms Dultseva were sentenced to 19 months in prison each after pleading guilty to espionage charges on Wednesday. But given their arrests in 2022, they were released on time and forced to leave Slovenia, as reported by the Associated Press.
Only on Thursday, during the large-scale prisoner exchange between Russia and the West, were the Kremlin spies, and their children, returned to Russia.
The lives of 11-year-old Sofia and 8-year-old Gabriel changed after that and they only learned they were Russians when the plane left Ankara for Vnukovo airport, the Kremlin said.
“The secret agents’ children asked their parents yesterday who had greeted them,” Peskov said, adding: “They didn’t even know who Putin was.”
The Kremlin spokesman said this is how secret agents work, “making such sacrifices for the sake of their work and dedication to their service.”
