Daughter of swapped prisoners wants to be a spy, like her parents

Raised by parents under deep cover, Sofia and Daniel Dultsevs have just learnt their life was a lie. But state TV was quick to parade their new loyalty to Russia.

President Vladimir Putin was on the tarmac to welcome back the Dultsevs: Anna, left, Sofia and her father Artyom, second right. Picture: by Mikhail Voskresenskiy/POOL / AFP

Less than a week ago, before they flew to Russia in a Cold War-style prisoner exchange, Sofia and Daniel Dultsev believed that they and their parents were Argentinians. They had also, if the Kremlin is to be believed, never heard of President Vladimir Putin.

Artyom and Anna Dultsev, their parents, had posed for years as Argentinian citizens in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Their neighbours knew them as Ludwig Gisch, an IT specialist, and Maria Mayer, an artist. The family spoke Spanish at home and English to the neighbours. Sofia, 12, and Daniel, 9, attended the local British International School.

Yet behind the carefully built facade, the parents were Russian deep-cover spies, or illegals, believed to have spent years carrying out missions across Europe. They were arrested in late 2022 in a police raid on the family home and the children placed in foster care.

It was only on Thursday, when they were on a Russian government plane to Moscow during a historic East-West prisoner swap, that their parents told them the truth: their entire lives had been a lie. “We told the children that we are Russian, that they are Russian, that we are the Dultsevs,” Artyom Dultsev told Russian state media.

It is not clear whether the couple told their children that they would probably never see their friends or home in Slovenia again.

In any case, Sofia “began to cry a little bit”, her father said. Daniel, whose birthday was on Monday, reacted “calmly, but positively”, he said.

When they landed in Moscow, Putin, a former KGB officer, was at the foot of the plane to meet them with flowers and hugs. “Buenas noches,” the Russian dictator said to the children in Spanish as their mother sobbed and a guard of honour stood to attention.

“Their parents raised them as Spanish-speaking Catholics and now they need to get to know what borscht is,” a presenter for Russia-1 said during an interview with the family.

Sofia held her mother’s as they walked the red carpet with Putin. Picture: Mikhail Voskresenskiy/POOL/AFP

The children were born in Argentina, where newborns are automatically granted citizenship, before the family moved to Slovenia. They have already learnt their first phrases in their mother tongue. “I have two grannies. Russia is beautiful,” said Sofia, in heavily accented Russian, during the TV interview. “I love my big family,” Daniel said.

The interview was filmed at an unnamed facility belonging to the Kremlin’s SVR foreign intelligence service, state TV said.

The children were shown trying to read the inscription on a bronze statue of Max Otto von Stierlitz, a fictional Soviet spy who is sometimes called the Russian James Bond. “Remember your duty,” it read.

Their mother said: “When we told Sofia who we were, that we were returning home, she asked if she could also be a spy.”

After so many years as a deep-cover agent, Anna Dultsev is also having problems speaking Russian again.

State media’s reporting on the story has been entirely positive, with no suggestion that the treatment of the Dultsev children was cruel or harmful. Picture: Kirill Zykov/POOL/AFP

“You don’t think in [your own] language. You control yourself all the time. When we arrived [in Moscow], we realised that we couldn’t speak Russian at all,” she said, pausing from time to time to look for the right words.

“We wrote some words down on a piece of paper and I called my mum and said, ‘We are home and everything is fine with the children.’ I was reading from the text. She started asking questions and I began crying because I knew what to answer, but nothing came out.”

State media’s reporting on the story has been entirely positive, with no suggestion that the treatment of the Dultsev children was cruel or harmful. Instead reports have focused entirely on the “sacrifices” made by their parents for Russia.

“Can you imagine what feats such families perform? For the sake of their motherland’s interests, they leave [Russia] and renounce their former identities,” said Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Kremlin-funded broadcaster.

“They live by a cover story and are forced to have children and raise them according to this cover story. All for their country’s benefit. What people!”

The Times