Russia has said the children of a Russian spy couple - released in a prisoner exchange yesterday - did not know they were Russian until they boarded a plane to Moscow.
"The children of the illegals who arrived yesterday only found out they were Russian on the plane from Ankara. They do not speak Russian," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Their parents, Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, had been posing as an Argentine couple who ran an IT business and art gallery in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin greeted the children with "buenas noches" - Spanish for "good evening" - after their arrival at an airport in Moscow.
"Illegals" is a term used to refer to undercover spies who live in foreign countries for years, or even decades, under fake identities, gathering intelligence to send back to Russia.
Russian security service operative freed by Germany
Meanwhile, Moscow said that Vadim Krasikov, freed by Germany as part of the swap, is an operative with Russia's FSB security service.
"Krasikov is an FSB employee," Mr Peskov said, adding that the operative served in the agency's elite "Alpha" special forces unit who "served with some of the people working in the president's security detail".
Krasikov was convicted by a German court of killing a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison - an assassination the judges said was ordered by the Russian state.
Mr Putin hugged Krasikov after he got off a plane in Moscow yesterday evening.
Mr Peskov said the exchange that saw 24 people freed yesterday had been negotiated by the FSB and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States.
It was the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.
President Putin hailed the return of the Russian prisoners - some of whom he said had "a direct connection" to the military - telling them: "The motherland never forgot about you".
Prisoner deal 'completely different' from Ukraine
Russia said that possible talks over the conflict in Ukraine were based on "completely different principles" from negotiations over the prisoner exchange.
"If we talk about Ukraine and more complex international problems, there are completely different principles," Mr Peskov said, when asked whether the swap could lead to negotiations over Ukraine.
"The work there is conducted in a completely different mode," he said.
There were official talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in 2022 in the weeks following the start of Russia's offensive but there have been none since then.
The two sides have some contact, often through intermediaries, for prisoner exchanges, the transfer of soldiers' remains and the return of children from Russia to Ukraine.
Ukraine in June organised a peace summit in Switzerland which was attended by representatives of around 100 countries.
Russia was not invited and China, a key Russian ally, declined to take part.
Ukraine has said that it is preparing a detailed peace plan by November as a basis for a second summit to which it has said that Russia will be invited.
Mr Putin has demanded Ukrainian troops abandon even more territory in the south and east of the country if Kyiv wants the fighting to stop.
The conditions have been described as unacceptable by Ukraine and the west.
