MOSCOW, Aug 3 — A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said yesterday.

"Before that, they didn’t know that they were Russian and that they had anything to do with our country,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"And you probably saw that when the children came down the plane’s steps that they don’t speak Russian and that Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said ‘buenas noches’.”

Giving new details about the swap and those freed, Peskov confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, a hitman released by Germany, was an employee of Russia’s FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB’s special forces unit.

Krasikov was convicted by a German court of killing a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park in 2019. President Vladimir Putin hugged him after he got off a plane in Moscow on Thursday evening.

Krasikov, wearing a baseball cap and a tracksuit top, was the first of the returnees to disembark the plane and meet Putin, signalling his importance to Moscow, which prides itself on bringing home intelligence operatives arrested abroad.

Among those released were the so-called "illegal” sleeper agents — the Dultsevs, a husband and wife convicted a court in Slovenia of pretending to be Argentinians in order to spy, who were flown back to Russia with their two children.

Peskov said that while the couple were being held in jail, they were given only restricted access to their children, and feared they could lose their parental rights.

"The children asked their parents yesterday who it was that was meeting them (in Moscow). They didn’t even know who Putin was. This is how the ‘illegals’ work. They make such sacrifices out of dedication to their work,” Peskov said.

Peskov said that Russian government agencies were working on freeing other Russians abroad. The exchange had been negotiated by the FSB and the US Central Intelligence Agency, he said.

Putin’s decision to meet them on the tarmac was "a tribute to people 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,” he said.

The trade involved 24 prisoners, including 16 moving from Russia to the West and eight prisoners held in the West sent back to Russia. Those released by Moscow included US journalist Evan Gershkovich and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who also holds British citizenship.

Although Moscow released more prisoners than it received, it was portrayed by Russian authorities as a victory, and appeared to go over well on the streets of Moscow.

"I am not remotely political, but any way you look at it: any exchange is wonderful, that our Russian comrades returned to the motherland,” said Zulfia, interviewed in the city centre.

Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy wanted by Britain for murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with atomic poison and now serving as head of an ultranationalist party’s faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram: "Our people are at home with their families. And for each of them it is no pity to hand over a bunch of foreign agent scum.”

Asked if the prisoner swap was a sign that Russia might be ready to strike a compromise deal on Ukraine, Peskov said they were different situations and that work on a possible diplomatic solution to what Russia calls its "special military operation” in Ukraine was being conducted on "different principles”. — Reuters