ST PETERSBURG, Russia — Russia has released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American jailed on charges of fighting for Ukraine, as President Vladimir Putin met U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on Wednesday, BBC News and The Guardian reported.
Putin said during the meeting that Hubbard had been taken to the city’s Pulkovo Airport. The former teacher from Michigan was captured by Russian forces in Izyum, Ukraine, shortly after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and was sentenced in 2024 to almost seven years in a penal colony. The U.S. State Department had classified him as “wrongfully detained.”
President Donald Trump said Hubbard was “on his way back home” and that the release followed a request he “made directly” to Putin last week. “There was no ‘swap’ necessary for this release,” he wrote, according to The Guardian. Some earlier releases of Americans held in Russia came through prisoner exchanges. The White House announced the release on X:
CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. partner, reported that Hubbard had been in poor health and was expected to be flown to Texas for treatment.
Witkoff praised Putin at the start of the talks at the Constantine Palace. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian — you are a humanitarian also sir, and I salute that,” he said. Witkoff, who met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Oslo the day before, said he had brought “some ideas, some sort of peace deal between Russia and Ukraine,” The Guardian reported. It was his ninth visit to Russia since Trump tasked him with brokering an end to the war.
Witkoff also thanked Putin for this month’s deal to export Russian diesel to the United States. Putin said the first shipment would leave Russia “in two to three days,” according to the state news agency TASS, BBC News reported.
In Kyiv, Zelenskyy wrote that “much depends on whether the American side can hear something new from Russia today — about peace, and not about continuing the war.”
Sources: BBC News, The Guardian, AP
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