MOSCOW - A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday (Aug 2).

"Before that, they didn't know that they were Russian and that they had anything to do with our country," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"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'."

Giving new details about the swap and those freed, Peskov confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, a hitman released by Germany, was an employee of Russia's FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB's special forces unit.

Krasikov was convicted by a German court of killing a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park in 2019. President Vladimir Putin hugged him after he got off a plane in Moscow on Thursday evening.

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