Two small children, Sofia, a girl, and Daniel, a boy, were shown climbing into a plane that was about to take a mix of cybercriminals, spies and an assassin back to Russia as part of a massive prisoner swap on August 1. They were the children of a sleeper agent couple arrested in Slovenia and released again as part of the deal. But the kids only found out they were Russian after the plane took off.

The children’s parents seemed to be perfectly normal. Artem and Anna Dultsev were an Argentinian couple that have been living in Ljubljana, the capital of EU member Slovenia, since 2017. He ran a successful IT start-up. She had an online gallery.

Their children were enrolled in the international school in Ljubljana and had a perfectly normal life. Their parents seemed to prosper and went on frequent trips around Europe.

It all went wrong in 2022 when the Slovenian authorities finally worked out that the couple were actually Russian, living under false passports with the fake identities of Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer, and were deep cover sleeper agents working for Russia’s military spy network, the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of the  Russian Federation).

On those trips, the pair would delivery money, carry orders from the Kremlin and collect intelligence from other spies scattered around Europe. The Dultsevs were arrested and sentenced to more than a year and a half in prison. On July 31, 2024, just one day before a planned prisoner swap, they pleaded guilty to spying and falsifying documents. They were sentenced to 17 months in jail but released the next day and ordered to leave Slovenia as part of the prisoner swap.

The parents told the children of their true nationality and origin as soon as the plane took off from Ankara and was on its way to Moscow.

"The children of the sleeper agents who flew in yesterday learned that they were Russian only when the plane took off from Ankara," presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters as the Kremlin starts debriefing the press after all the prisoners arrive safely in Russia last night. "When the children came down the airplane ramp – they don't speak Russian – Putin greeted them in Spanish, he said ‘Buenas noches’,” Peskov said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met the prisoners at the airport and greeted each of them as they disembarked. The children got a smile and a friendly handshake from the Russian leader but were confused, as they don’t speak a word of Russian and had no idea who he was.

"The children of the sleeper agents asked their parents yesterday who greeted them, they didn't even know who Putin was," Peskov said, reports TASS. "But this is how sleeper agents work. These are the kinds of sacrifices they have to make in their line of work, for the sake of their country," he added.

Peskov also admitted that Vadim Krasikov was an FSB agent for the first time. Krasikov was the keystone in the prisoner exchange deal and was released from a German jail, where he had been serving a life sentence for gunning down a Chechen-Georgian dissident in Berlin’s Tiergarten park in broad daylight. Krasikov was on the plane with the two children.

The conversation on the plane with the two children was the first chance their parents had to explain what was going on, according to Peskov. After their parents’ arrest, the two children were placed in the care of a foster parent.

"The sleeper agents were in prison," Peskov said. "They were deprived of the opportunity to see their children the whole time."

Although Anna Dultseva and husband Artyom Dultsev were deemed to have already served their time in Slovenia for espionage, the two felt that they could not stay in the country. "There was a real threat that if they stayed there, their parental rights would be terminated," the Kremlin spokesman stressed.

So they boarded the plane and returned to Russia with their children, who will have start afresh.