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How would you react if you found out your parents were foreign spies from a country where you couldn’t even speak the language?
The Thursday prisoner exchange that secured the freedom of journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, as well former Marine Paul Whelan and more than a dozen others from Russian captivity also generated one mind-boggling anecdote seemingly straight out of a Soviet-era spy novel.
Among those swapped were Anna Dultseva and Artyom Dultsev, Russian spies who had been posing as an Argentinian couple in Slovenia. Not even their school-age children, who spoke Spanish with their parents, knew their true origins — until the parents revealed their identities after their release on the plane to Russia.
In a TV report aired by Russia’s state-owned Rossiya-24 on Monday, the family confirmed the now-widespread reports the children were raised as Spanish-speaking Catholics and explained how the children took the news.
Dultsev said their daughter “cried a little bit.” Their son was more calm and took the news “very positively.”
Dultseva said that after their arrest in 2022, Argentina had reportedly wanted to take their children away, but Slovenia did everything to keep them in the country “for us to be together.”
Eva Hartog contributed to this report.
