The Kremlin has admitted that several of the people returned to Russia in Thursday’s prisoner swap were spies.
Among those released in the multinational exchange was Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who had been serving a life sentence in Germany for murdering one of Moscow’s enemies in a park in Berlin. On Friday, the Kremlin confirmed that Krasikov was an employee of Russia’s FSB security service who had served in the agency’s elite Alpha Group special forces unit.
Krasikov was the first of the returnees to be embraced by Russian President Vladimir Putin after their plane landed in Moscow on Thursday evening, underscoring the hitman’s importance to the Kremlin.
