▲ Arrival in Moscow last Thursday of the agents released as part of a prisoner exchange.Photo Ap

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, August 3, 2024, p. 19

Moscow. The Kremlin yesterday justified the welcome with state honours, a red carpet and a guard of honour, given by President Vladimir Putin at the foot of the plane’s steps to the eight Russians who were released in the largest prisoner exchange carried out on Thursday since the days of the Cold War between Russia and the United States and its allies.

It is something very important: a tribute to those people who serve their country and who, after very difficult tests, thanks to the hard work of many people, were able to return to their homeland.said Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov at his regular press conference.

The spokesman revealed that Vadim Krasikov, sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany for murdering Zelimjan Jangoshvili, a former commander of a Chechen separatist group, in a Berlin park, He is an agent of the FSB (Federal Security Service) and before that he was a member of the elite group Alfa (the successor agency of the Soviet KGB), during which time he coincided with several of the president’s bodyguards. They certainly welcomed him last night..

Putin himself hugged Krasikov as soon as he got off the plane and, in the interview he gave last February to the American Tucker Carlson, he referred to him as patriot who fulfilled his duty by executing a bloodthirsty criminal. Krasikov’s surrender, described as not an easy decision by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, provoked mixed reactions in Germany.

Peskov admitted that the exchanged group included: undercover agents Anna and Artiom Dultsev, who lived in Slovenia under the names of Maria Rosa Mayer Muñoz and Ludwig Gisch, supposedly Argentines of German origin.

Arrested in December 2022, they rented a premises in Ljubljana and were engaged in the sale of real estate and antiques. The day before the exchange, after confessing to being spies, a Slovenian court sentenced them to one year and seven months in prison.

Putin’s spokesman said they were included in the exchange at the risk of having their parental rights taken away if they stayed there and his two youngest children found out that their parents were actually Russian when they boarded the plane and, since they do not speak the language, the President “greeted them in Spanish, said: ‘good night’.”

According to Peskov, another of those who returned, without giving his name, was “an agent of the military intelligence directorate (GRU, for its acronym in Russian). In the international press, since he was arrested in Norway for carry out espionage workthere is a version circulating that it is Mikhail Mikushin, an academic from the University of Tromso, who presented himself as Brazilian under the name of José Assis Giammaria.

The Kremlin declined to explain why the group included Spanish journalist Pablo Gonzalez (Pavel Rubtsov, according to his Russian passport). He was being held in Poland on suspicion of spying for Russia, although Warsaw never brought charges against him during the two years and five months he was behind bars.

The reason for its inclusion and other details cannot be the subject of public discussion.Peskov responded to the Spanish agency EFE.

The Polish government said on Friday that it had released Gonzalez, whom it called spy with dual nationalityand closed the investigation opened against him because Poland is a loyal member of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), a loyal ally of the United Statesaccording to the Polish news agency PAP.

Meanwhile, a group of human rights experts from the United Nations issued a statement in Geneva expressing their satisfaction at the the release of 16 political prisoners in Russia as a result of the recent exchange and, at the same time, they denounce that there There are still 1,372 other people in prison for expressing their political opinions and opposing the war in Ukraine..

The signatories of the statement, including the UN Special Rapporteurs for the Russian Federation, Mariana Katzarova of Bulgaria, and for human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor of Ireland, call on the Kremlin to release them.

It is crucial to amend criminal laws and prevent their misuse to silence dissent and persecute opposition figures, human rights defenders and journalists who truthfully report on the war against Ukraine and are critical of the government.