The red carpet was rolled out and a guard of honour was laid on at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport in the early hours of Friday as Vladimir Putin personally met the eight Russian citizens returned as part of the biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West in modern history.
Among the eight returnees were convicted FSB assassin Vadim Krasikov, who had been serving a life sentence in a German prison for killing a former Chechen rebel commander in broad daylight in a Berlin park in 2019, as well as Russian deep cover agents Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, who were arrested in Slovenia in 2022 and convicted of espionage just days ago.
In a short address, Putin thanked the freed Russian prisoners for their “loyalty to your oath, your duty, and to your Motherland, which never forgot about you for a moment” and assured them that they would be afforded state honours.
Krasikov’s return to Russia was a key condition of the Kremlin agreeing to the exchange, according to German newspaper Die Welt, which reported that the assassin had not been pardoned by the German authorities, but simply deported from the country.
Commenting on the return of Russian prisoners to Moscow, the Russian Embassy in Washington said it would do the “utmost to continue the release and ease the plight” of Russian citizens who had “ended up in American prisons as a result of a ‘hunt’ by US intelligence services around the world”.