Putin, a former KGB officer and ex-head of Russia’s FSB security service, met the eight returnees at a Moscow airport and hugged them or shook their hands, giving some of them bouquets of flowers as they came off the plane onto a red carpet flanked by a Kremlin honor guard.
President Vladimir Putin gave Russian nationals freed in an historic prisoner exchange with the West a hero’s welcome on Thursday as they stepped off a plane in Moscow, promising them state awards and a conversation about their futures.
Eight people were returned to Russia as part of the biggest East-West prisoner exchange since the end of the Cold War, including Vadim Krasikov, a hitman convicted by a German court of killing a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park, and two men convicted of cyber crimes in the United States, Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznyov.
Among those Moscow also got back: a Russian family, the Dultsevs, including their two children, whom a court in Slovenia convicted of pretending to be Argentinians in order to spy on the EU and NATO member state.
