Children of spies only discovered they were Russian on the plane to Moscow, Kremlin says

Why did Russian President Vladimir Putin greet the children of just-freed Russian spies in Spanish?

The reason is straight out of an episode of the hit TV spy show “The Americans.”

Among the first prisoners stepping off the plane to greet President Putin was a slender brown-haired woman grasping the hand of her young daughter. She appeared to stifle a sob as she hugged Putin. He handed her a bouquet of purple and white flowers, and another to her daughter. Putin also hugged her husband and kissed their son.

Then, over the din of the airplane, Putin could be heard greeting the children with “buenas noches” — the Spanish phrase for “good evening.”

Their parents were undercover Russian spies who posed as Argentinian citizens living in Slovenia and went by the names Ludwig Gisch and Maria Rosa Mayer Muños. They were part of Thursday’s massive prisoner swap involving several countries.

In “The Americans,” two Russian spies posing as a married couple in suburban America run Soviet agents and collect intelligence, unbeknownst to their young children. And the complex, controversial, Cold War-style prisoner swap from this week included at least one storyline seemingly written for it.

The two children, whose names have not been released, were swept up in a sprawling geopolitical world of stolen intelligence, kidnapped Westerners and historic deals, punctuated by the scene on the tarmac that analysts say could play into the Kremlin’s efforts to spin the prisoner swap as a propaganda win.

The former prisoners moved to Slovenia in 2017, according to The Associated Press. The husband ran a startup. The wife had an online art gallery. Their actual names were Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva.

The Dultsevas were two of the eight Russians imprisoned in the U.S. and Europe and traded for four Americans — including Evan Gershkovitch and Paul Whelan — five Germans and seven Russian political prisoners released to the West.

According to the AP, the couple used Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, as their base to travel to neighboring countries, relay orders from Moscow and bring cash to other Russian sleeper agents.

Their children attended an international school in Ljubljana and, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, were only told on the plane to Moscow that they were Russian.

“Before that, they did not know that they were Russian, that they had anything to do with our country,” Peskov said in a statement on Friday.

“They asked their parents yesterday who this guy was meeting them, they didn’t even know who Putin was,” Peskov said, before praising intelligence officers who “make such sacrifices for the sake of their work, for the sake of devotion to the cause.”

That message — that Russian agents do important work for the motherland and that Moscow will always fight to get them back — is central to why President Putin will believe he scored a propaganda victory.

In this era, described by some as a new Cold War, the Kremlin needs professional spies willing to dedicate their life. Putin, himself a former KGB officer, is sending a message not just to the Russian people but to his intelligence agencies, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Putin is demonstrating “to the spies and murderers that he is akin to their father, which means there is hope that they will serve him even more zealously,” Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and former Putin speechwriter turned critic, wrote on Telegram.

“To the bulk of the Russian public, the Russian president showed that he has not yet lost the remnants of adequacy and is capable of well-calculated, rational actions,” Gallyamov said.

Artem Viktorovich Dultsev and Anna Valerevna Dultseva were arrested in Slovenia in 2022 and charged with espionage and using fake documents to register their firms. On Wednesday, the day before the swap was announced, they were sentenced to 19 months in prison each, after pleading guilty to spying charges.

In a speech delivered in the airport terminal to the returnees — which included spies as well as smugglers, cybercriminals and an assassin — Putin said: “I would like to thank you for the loyalty to your oath, your duty and your motherland, which has not forgotten you for even a minute.”

It’s a message that’s likely to be heard in hidden networks far beyond Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport.