Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he has sung Soviet-era patriotic songs with the 10 spies deported from the United States and knows the identities of those who betrayed them.

Putin described his meeting with the spies during a trip to Ukraine, where he also rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sought to bolster Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Putin did not say when or where he met with the 10 spies, who arrived in Moscow on July 9 and most recently were reportedly being debriefed at a Foreign Intelligence Service building in Moscow’s outskirts.

“I met with them. We talked about life,” Putin told reporters Saturday at the Crimean resort of Foros, according to a transcript published on the prime minister’s web site.

“They will find decent work — I’m sure. I don’t doubt that they will have interesting, bright lives,” said Putin, who served as a KGB agent in East Germany in the 1980s and led the Federal Security Service in the late 1990s.

He said he had joined them in singing several songs, including “With What the Motherland Begins?” from the 1968 Soviet movie “The Shield and the Sword” about an undercover Russian spy in Nazi Germany.

“I’m not joking, seriously. And other songs with similar content,” Putin said, adding that the songs were sung to live music, not karaoke.

The prime minister confirmed that Anna Chapman, the most well-known female spy from the group who married a British man and later divorced, also attended the meeting.

Putin said a betrayal had sparked the spy scandal and promised tough times for the traitors, whose names he said are known.

“Traitors always end badly. As a rule, they end up in the gutter as drunks or drug addicts,” he said.

When asked whether the state was planning to take revenge on the traitors, Putin said, “The special services live under their own laws, and everyone knows what these laws are.”

U.S. officials have not said how they learned about the 10 spies, who pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to being agents for the Russian government while living as “illegals” — deep-cover spies who pose as ordinary people without the immunity offered by diplomatic passports. Many of the Russians adopted fake names and lived in suburban America for years, buying homes and raising families as they sought to glean information and make recruits in U.S. government policy-making circles.

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