Vadim Krasikov, a hit man returned by Germany in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War, is an employee of Russia’s FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB’s special forces unit, the Kremlin says.

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.

Krasikov, wearing a baseball cap and a tracksuit top, was the first of the returnees to disembark the plane and meet 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 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,” 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 Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said ‘Buenas noches’.”

“The children asked their parents yesterday who it was that was meeting them (in Moscow). They didn’t even know who Putin was. This is how the ‘illegals’ work. They make such sacrifices out of dedication to their work.”

Peskov, who said Russian government agencies were working on freeing other Russians abroad, said the prisoner exchange, which pro-Kremlin analysts have cast as a win for Moscow, had been negotiated by the FSB and the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Peskov said Putin had felt it vital to meet the returnees in person at the airport off their plane.

“It was a tribute to people who serve their country and who after very difficult trials, and thanks to the hard work of many people, have been able to return to the motherland,” he said.

Putin has promised the returnees state awards and a conversation about their futures.

Asked if the prisoner swap was a sign that Russia might be ready to strike a compromise deal on Ukraine, Peskov said they were different situations and that work on a possible diplomatic solution to what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine was being conducted on “different principles.”

–AAP