Russia has freed Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired American schoolteacher held in Russian custody for more than four years, in a goodwill gesture announced just as US special envoy Steve Witkoff sat down with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.
Putin told Witkoff at the start of their meeting at the Constantine Palace that Hubbard was already at Pulkovo airport, Russian state media reported. Witkoff thanked the Russian president for the release, according to CNN.
Hubbard, a retired teacher from Big Rapids, Michigan, was the only American prisoner in Russia whom Washington had designated as “wrongfully detained.” He had been serving a nearly seven-year sentence handed down at a closed-door trial on charges of mercenary activity in Ukraine — charges he consistently denied.
He was arrested in April 2022 in Izyum, the eastern Ukrainian city where he had lived since 2014. Russian prosecutors alleged he had been manning a Ukrainian military checkpoint after signing a contract worth about $1,000 a month, and Russian state media reported that he pleaded guilty. But his US-based lawyer, Martin De Luca, told Reuters that Hubbard said the charges were false and that he had never served in any combat or military unit. His sister, Patricia Hubbard Fox, called the mercenary accusation a lie.
Hubbard’s biography bears no resemblance to the man in the Russian prosecution’s account. He spent 25 years teaching English in Japan after earning a master’s degree in English, served in the US Air Force and National Guard, and moved to Izyum with his Ukrainian partner in 2014. His sister said he subsisted on a pension of about $300 a month, and the two last spoke in September 2021. She later recognized him in a video showing a man being questioned about his views on Putin and the war — and in another clip, his hands bound, being struck with a sandal.
The release came at the top of a meeting that was always meant to be about bigger things. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had raised Hubbard’s case with Putin, and a US official said ahead of the trip that Witkoff’s visit was “expected to include efforts to seek the release of wrongfully detained American citizen Hubbard, reflecting President Trump’s continued commitment to bringing Americans home.”
At the table, Witkoff pressed Putin to consider resuming trilateral talks between Russia, the United States and Ukraine where technical issues could be discussed, according to TASS. Putin expressed interest in restoring economic cooperation with the United States, the agency reported. Video of the meeting showed the two men around a large round table with translators, discussing a range of issues including Russia’s willingness to help resolve the war in Iran and potential Russian fertilizer exports to the US.
It was the ninth time Witkoff has met Putin in person. But hours earlier, Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov made clear the central obstacle had not moved: “No compromises have been found as of yet” on Ukraine, he said, with territorial questions the main sticking point. Earlier Wednesday, Ushakov told reporters that some American proposals were acceptable to Moscow while others were not — and when asked whether peace was now closer, he answered: “Definitely not further.”
The release fits a pattern: prisoner goodwill gestures accompanying US-Russia diplomacy, following the release of Marine veteran Robert Gilman in August on humanitarian grounds. It is also a reminder of how personally the war in Ukraine has become entangled with Washington’s diplomacy — from disputes over intelligence sharing to the satellite slowdown Kyiv says hobbled its drones.
Why it matters beyond the headline: a 74-year-old man is going home. But nothing about the war changed at that round table. The territory, the security guarantees, the future of Ukraine’s military — everything that has kept the shooting going through more than four years of war — remains exactly where it was when Witkoff’s plane landed at Pulkovo. Hubbard’s release is a small opening of a door; the war itself is still firmly shut.
