In the prisoner exchange between the West and Russia, mainly top Kremlin spies were released in exchange for journalists and Russian opposition figures. Among them were a spy couple and their two children.
Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva lived in Slovenia under a false Argentinian identity – their children had no idea that they were Russian until they flew to Moscow. They were born in Argentina and later moved to Slovenia with their parents.
Now Kremlin propaganda is butchering the largest prisoner exchange between the West and Russia since the Cold War: Only a few days after landing in their homeland, the Dultsevs and their children are interviewed on state television.
The parents don’t seem to have a problem with embarrassing their children like this. Or they have no choice.
Pure family idyll? Kremlin propaganda shows the children of the spy couple on television
Hand in hand, the family walks through a park on the premises of the foreign intelligence service SVR in Moscow, talks about what it was like being detained in Slovenia and what they will do now.
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At the time of the recording, son Daniel was celebrating his ninth birthday, so the Russian propaganda reporter brought him, among other things, cuddly toys of the well-known film and novel character Cheburashka, whose stories were invented during the Soviet era.
The reporter asks the mother: “What does Cheburashka mean in Spanish?” – because the children hardly speak any Russian. During their mission in Slovenia, the spies only spoke Spanish with them and kept their identities secret from them.
The reporter from the state television channel Rossija 1 gives the spies’ son Cheburashka cuddly toys for his birthday
Dultsev told the reporter that during his detention he received visits from the Russian foreign intelligence service, who gave him “greetings from Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putind. Red.) and said that everything was being done to help them. “That meant a lot,” the spy said.
On the plane from Ankara to Moscow, “we told the children that we are Russians, that they are Russians.” The girl “cried a little.” The boy was “quiet, but very positive.” Dultsev: “The most important thing for us is family, it keeps us afloat. The country is also family.”
“I love my big family,” the boy says in broken Russian during the television report. His mother praises him in Spanish: “Muy bien” (very good).
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The couple and their children are now on vacation, the reporter reports. After that, however, they will “continue working to serve Russia.” Daughter Sofia (11) is good at languages and has already expressed her interest in becoming a spy as well.
The state television correspondent concludes by assuring viewers that the Dultsevs are “high-class professionals who have devoted their entire lives to the motherland and made sacrifices that an ordinary person could never understand. They raised their children as Spanish-speaking Catholics. Now they will have to teach them what borscht is.”
