Sofia, 11, and Daniel, 8, did not speak the language and knew nothing about their new home country
The Russian government plane that landed in Moscow from Ankara on Thursday carried an assortment of spies, assassins and criminals, one half of the biggest prisoner exchange since the cold war.
But among the first to descend the stairs to the tarmac, where president Vladimir Putin was waiting to greet the returnees, were two young children, looking wide-eyed and confused.
Sofia, 11, and Daniel, 8, had been born in Argentina. They later moved with their parents, Maria Mayer and Ludwig Gisch, to Slovenia, where Mayer ran an online art gallery and Gisch started an IT company.
Mayer told friends the family had left their home country of Argentina to avoid street crime. The family spoke Spanish at home; the children went to an international school in Ljubljana, where they studied in English.
I mean, if I were 11 years old and I sat down with my mom and dad on an airplane, and they told me all at once that:
The brief period that I’ve been living with a foster family is over, and my parents are going to be raising me again.
I am leaving the country that I’ve been living in permanently.
I wasn’t actually a citizen of the (other) country that I thought I was and whose language I know.
My mom and dad are a team of deep-cover spies who are criminals in the country where we had been living and can’t go back.
They work for Russia.
We’re all citizens of Russia.
I need to start learning Russian now, as that’s what I’ll be using moving forward.
We’re all going to go live in Russia.
I’m about to personally meet with and be lauded by and presented with a boquet by the president of Russia, who I’ve never heard of, on camera, and need to be on good behavior.
That’s…kind of a lot for an eleven-year-old to get hit with at once.
EDIT: Well, they might have known some of that in advance. They might have known that they were permanently going to be with their parents, and while they can’t have known all of what was going on with their parents, since they didn’t know they were spying for Russia, they might have known that their parents were in some kind of trouble with the law.