A couple, each holding a child's hand, stepped off the official plane that had just landed overnight on the tarmac of Moscow's Vnukovo airport on Thursday, August 1. At the bottom of the gangway, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, stood ready, with a huge bouquet in hand. He kissed the woman, who couldn't help but cry, patted her back and kissed her shoulder again. To the 12-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother, who didn't seem to understand, he said a surprising "buenas noches." Never before had the head of the Kremlin shown such compassion in public, not even for his own country's victims of terrorism.
Behind the Russian leader, the presidential guard, standing stiff as a board, added to the solemnity of the moment, which was picked up by Russian TV cameras. The biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West, since the 1991 collapse of the USSR, had just been completed. In return for the release of 16 Russian and dual-national political prisoners, opposed to the war, the Kremlin received eight Russians held in several countries, including swindlers, criminals and spies.
Among those secret agents was Vadim Krassikov, alias Vadim Sokolov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 Berlin murder of a Georgian man who had fought with Chechen separatists. He was the first to get off the plane. "He served in Alfa," an elite intelligence unit of the FSB, Russia's security service, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. He even "served with several [current] employees of the president's security service," he said.
However, the most important passengers were the couple, who were "illegals" – spies working under total cover. In Putin's eyes, they are heroes. They had been arrested in December 2022, in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, where they had settled five years earlier, in 2017, Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva had created Argentine identities for themselves. Anna lived under the name Maria Rosa Mayer Muños, an alleged Greek national born on April 6, 1984, according to her passport, which was valid until 2032. She ran an online art gallery. Her partner, Ludwig Gisch, also born in 1984, ran an IT start-up.
In their pastel-colored house in Ljubljana, investigators found computers equipped with a system for communicating with the "Center" – Moscow in Russian espionage jargon – which were so well encrypted that neither Slovenian technicians nor their American counterparts were able to crack them, reported The Wall Street Journal in June. The American paper also noted that the couple kept hundreds of thousands of euros in bank notes hidden in a secret compartment in their refrigerator.
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