FSB agent, deep-cover Russian 'sleeper' agents among those returned in prisoner swap: Kremlin

Kremlin confirms hitman's FSB ties in East-West prisoner swap; Putin greets spies' children in Moscow.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Vadim Krasikov, a hitman returned by Germany in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, was an employee of Russia's FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB's special forces unit.

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

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

Among those Moscow also got back: a Russian family, the Dultsevs, including their two children, whom a court in Slovenia convicted of pretending to be Argentinians in order to spy on the EU and NATO member state.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday confirmed that the couple were "illegals" — deep-cover agents trained to impersonate foreigners, who spend years living abroad in their cover identities.

"The children of the 'illegal' intelligence agents who flew in yesterday only learnt that they were Russian after the plane took off (for Moscow) from Ankara," Mr. Peskov told reporters.

"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 Mr. Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said Buenos Nochas."