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  • February 18, 2025
Russian sleeper agents talk about secret trip to 2018 World Cup – Society and culture

Russian sleeper agents talk about secret trip to 2018 World Cup – Society and culture

MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, agents sent back to Russia in a prisoner exchange, say they made a secret visit to their motherland during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

“We went to Russia a few times, but this was not easy to organize, as you can imagine,” Artyom Dultsev said in an interview with Razvedchik magazine. “In the summer of 2018, when Russia hosted the Football World Cup. We seized the opportunity and came to Russia as foreigners. We attended a few matches, including one in Anna’s hometown Nizhny Novgorod, where we watched Argentina play against Croatia.”

He added that the city was full of Argentine football fans at the time, and he and his wife sat among them during the match. ‘Very unusual, I must say. We were at home, but strange (to everyone present),” the officer shared. “By the way, Argentina lost that match, which made Sofia (Dultsevs’ daughter) sad; she even cried a little.”

According to Anna Dultseva, the couple also took this opportunity to arrange a meeting with their relatives. “It was in my parents’ country house; both sides of the family came. The children, of course, didn’t understand anything: that we were in the countryside and that the people in front of them were their grandparents. They were still too young and didn’t appreciate questions,” she explained. “Still, we decided that a trip to Nizhny would be important for them. They will remember it and it will help them adjust when they come back.”

The couple, Artyom Dultsev and Anna Dultseva, returned home after an exchange. The family arrived in Slovenia in 2017 with Argentine passports. There they founded an IT company and an online gallery. After the start of the special operation in Ukraine in 2022, intelligence agents from an unspecified country advised Ljubljana to pay close attention to the family. The couple was arrested and their two children, a boy and a girl, were placed in foster care. Investigators argued that they were secret agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. The couple pleaded guilty. On July 31, 2024, a court in Ljubljana sentenced them to one year and seven months in prison for espionage. They had already spent approximately this period in custody.