The Kremlin has admitted that several of the people returned to Russia in Thursday’s prisoner swap were spies.
Among those released in the multinational exchange was Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering one of Moscow’s enemies in a park in Berlin. On Friday, the Kremlin confirmed that Krasikov was an employee of Russia’s FSB security service who had served in the agency’s elite Alpha Group special forces unit.
Krasikov was the first of the returnees to be embraced by Russian President Vladimir Putin after their plane landed in Moscow on Thursday evening, underscoring the hitman’s importance to the Kremlin.
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In 2019, Krasikov followed Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen rebel leader, to a busy children’s playground in a park in Berlin. In broad daylight, he then pulled out a pistol and executed Khangoshvili in front of children and their parents, witnesses said at his trial. Prosecutors said during the proceedings that Krasikov was likely working with the FSB.
Putin, meanwhile, had openly sought Krasikov’s return to Russia even while remaining vague about the killer’s ties to the intelligence services. In his February interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin clearly referred to Krasikov when discussing a potential prisoner swap deal. “That person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals,” Putin said, later adding: “Whether he did it of his own volition or not, that is a different question.”
The Kremlin was also unequivocal Friday about two other people released in the swap deal. Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva—a couple who were returned to Russia along with their two children—were arrested in Slovenia in 2022 and accused of pretending to be Argentinians while spying on the NATO state. They both pleaded guilty to espionage charges in Ljubljana on Wednesday, ahead of the prisoner swap.
Now Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has confirmed the pair were in fact deep-cover “illegals,” secret agents who are trained to pass as foreigners while living under fake identities in foreign countries. In a detail reminiscent of the FX show The Americans, Peskov confirmed that even the couple’s children were kept in the dark about their true identity.
“The children of the ‘illegal’ intelligence agents who flew in yesterday only learnt that they were Russian after the plane took off [from Moscow] for Ankara,” Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters. “Before that, they didn’t know that they were Russian and that they had anything to do with our country. 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.’”
He added that the kids “didn’t even know who Putin was.” “This is how the ‘illegals’ work,” Peskov said. “They make such sacrifices out of dedication to their work.”
The spies were among eight adults that Russia received in the prisoner swap—the largest between Russia and Western countries since the Cold War. In return, Russia released 16 people including American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. marine Paul Whelan, both of whom the U.S. considered wrongfully detained.
