The two Russians who were arrested in Slovenia in December 2022 on spying charges have pleaded guilty in a secret trial at the Ljubljana District Court and have been sentenced to one year and seven months in prison each.

The court confirmed on 31 July that the Russians had been sentenced to one year and five months in prison for espionage, and three months in prison for the criminal act of certification of untrue content.

They have received aggregate sentences of one year and seven months and have been banned from the country for five years. The time they spent in detention and custody counts in the sentence.

The court also ordered seizure of the items they had used and intended for the criminal acts, as well as cash obtained by means of these acts.

EU agency alleged target

The spies, a man and a woman, were arrested in early December 2022. They were reported to be in a partnership, have two children and Argentinean citizenship. They went by the names of Ludwig Gisch and Maria Rosa Mayer Munoz.

Their actual names are Artem Viktorovich Dulcev and Ana Valerevna Dulceva, and they are elite operatives of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Wall Street Journal reported in June, referring to Slovenian and Western intelligence officers.

According to the newspaper, their target in Slovenia was the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, based in Ljubljana, not far from the house in which they resided.

They also reportedly used Slovenia as a base for trips to Italy, Croatia and elsewhere in Europe to get in touch with other intelligence agents, to whom they relayed orders from Moscow.

Exchange expected to follow

The N1 news portal reports that the Russians will most likely not serve their sentences in Slovenia, and could be part of a larger exchange of prisoners that could take place in the coming hours between Russia, the US, Germany and Belarus.

The exchange may include Vadim Krasikov, an operative of the Russian Federal Security Service, who is serving a life sentence in Germany for the assassination of Chechen commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019.

The pressure to include Krasikov is said to be exerted primarily by Belarus, which has sentenced German citizen Rico Krieger to death on extremism and terrorism charges at the end of June.

He too could be part of the exchange as he has recently been pardoned by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

It is also possible for the exchange to include American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in Russia in mid-July on military industrial espionage charges, N1 adds.

Since no Slovenian citizens are imprisoned in Russia, Slovenia cannot make an exchange. The convicted Russian spies can be extradited to Russia, which could then hand over detained citizens of other Western countries in exchange.