President Dmitry Medvedev, yesterday handed top state honours to the Russian spies deported from the United States in July in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War, the Kremlin said.

Sexy spy gets top honour

President Dmitry Medvedev, yesterday handed top state honours to the Russian spies deported from the United States in July in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War, the Kremlin said.

"A ceremony took place in the Kremlin yesterday to hand top state honours to a number of Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) employees, including the spies who were working in the United States and returned to Russia in July," Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said in a statement on Russian news agencies.

No television footage or pictures have so far been released of the ceremony, which came on the same day as Medvedev received the credentials of new foreign ambassadors.

The group of 10 spies, many of whom had been working for years undercover in the United States as sleeper agents, returned to Russia in a sensational spy swap that saw Moscow send four Russian convicts to the West.

The group included the glamorous Anna Chapman, who became a figure of international notoriety and mysteriously resurfaced earlier this month at a space launch at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Chapman was snapped by photographers outside the astronauts' hotel, but was swiftly led away by guards.

She wrote on her Facebook page that she visited the launch of the Soyuz rocket, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, because of "pride for my motherland and humanity in general."

She appeared in a magazine photoshoot in a central Moscow hotel in clingy cocktail dresses and attended a party organised by the Russian edition of Maxim magazine.