When 11-year-old Sofia and her brother Gabriel, 8, stepped off the plane at Moscow’s Vnukuvo airport last Thursday, they were met by an unfamiliar balding man in a dark suit.
“Buenas noches,” he said, addressing them in Spanish, the language they spoke at home.
Surrounded by media, security and other functionaries, he embraced Sofia and her mother, handing them flowers and welcoming them to the Russian capital. It must have been a bewildering sight.
Later, according to the Kremlin, the children asked their parents who the man there to greet them on the red carpet had been. Vladimir Putin, they explained.
