On Thursday night, two children — a boy and a girl — got off a plane in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport.
Waiting for them on the tarmac was President Vladimir Putin.
The Russian leader gave a huge bunch of flowers to their mother, kissing her on the cheek. A smaller bouquet went to the girl.
“Buenas noches” (good evening), Putin told the children, in Spanish.
The children had just arrived from Ankara, Turkey. They were born in Argentina. But what they didn’t know until they boarded the flight was that their parents were actually Russian spies who had lived under deep cover since before they were born.
Putin had shown up to personally receive two Russian spies returning to their home country. They had been posing as an Argentine couple, first in Buenos Aires and then in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana. Their return was part of the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the West since the Cold War. The spies, named Artyom and Anna Dultsev, had managed to get Argentine passports.
The Dultsevs’ children, 8 and 10, did not speak a word of Russian, hence Putin’s Spanish-language greeting.
The prisoner transfer took place in Ankara, Turkey. “The children of the illegals who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the plane from Ankara. They do not speak Russian,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday. “Illegals” is a term used to refer to Russian undercover spies who live in foreign countries under fake identities, gathering intelligence for the Kremlin.
From 2012 to 2017, the Dultsevs lived under the names of Ludwig Gisch and María Rosa Mayer Muños in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano. Artyom (“Ludwig”) entered the country from Uruguay. He claimed to be an Austrian citizen born in Namibia to an Argentine mother. Anna (“María Rosa”) presented herself as a Mexican citizen born in Greece. After leaving Argentina, they moved to Slovenia, where they ran an IT business and art gallery as a front. At the end of 2022, their cover was blown and they were arrested.
Peskov noted that the children could have been separated from their parents had they stayed in Slovenia. “When the illegals were in prison, they were deprived of the opportunity to see their children,” he said. “There was a real threat, if they had stayed there, that they would have been deprived of their parental rights.”
The news has striking similarities with the plot of The Americans, a TV series portraying two fictional Russian spies posing as a local suburban couple in the United States. The fictional duo even has two children who are unaware of their parents’ true origins. “The Argentinians” trended on X on Friday.
The prisoner exchange involved 26 prisoners from seven countries —Russia, Belarus, Slovenia, the United States, Germany, Poland, and Norway, Russian media outlet TASS reported. The Turkish intelligence agency coordinated the operation. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, 10 people, including two children, were handed over to Russia, 13 to Germany, and three to the United States.
The swap also included Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in 2019. On Friday, Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, admitted that Krasikov was an employee of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s main security agency.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was convicted of spying in Russia and jailed for a year and four months, was also freed in the exchange. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greeted him and the other two U.S. citizens who were freed.
Peskov said that Putin wanted to meet the freed Russians at the airport as a sign of respect for their service to their country.
“This is very important. This is a tribute to those people who serve their country, who after very difficult trials were allowed, thanks to the very hard work of many, many people, to return to their homeland,” Peskov said.
The press secretary said that the negotiations were conducted mainly through Russia’s FSB and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.