Trump says he has asked Putin to free the American teacher Stephen Hubbard, and hints at news within days

The question was about a prisoner, and the president answered like a man holding a card he does not want to show yet.

“I don’t want to talk about it, but everybody has been after Hubbard for a long time, long before I got here,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Just remember that question for a couple of days from now, okay? Because I do things that nobody else can do. Watch what happens. We have been focused on Hubbard.” He said he has raised the case with Vladimir Putin directly. “I’ve been talking to President Putin about Mr. Hubbard. I’ve been talking to him at length. It’s time to get Mr. Hubbard back.”

Stephen Hubbard, 74, is a retired English teacher from a small town in Michigan who was living in eastern Ukraine when Russia invaded in February 2022. Russian forces captured him at the start of the war. He was taken to Moscow and is serving a nearly seven year sentence in a penal colony after a Russian court convicted him on mercenary charges. The State Department has declared him wrongfully detained, and ABC News reported he is the only American held in Russia carrying that designation.

The machinery around the case is moving. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Oslo on Tuesday and is travelling on to Russia for more talks about ending the war. A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the trip “is also expected to include efforts to seek the release of wrongfully detained American citizen Hubbard, reflecting President Trump’s continued commitment to bringing Americans home.” ABC News reported, citing US officials and a source familiar with the matter, that talks on freeing several Americans held in Russia are in their final stages, while cautioning that nothing has been finalised and a deal could still change or fall through. At least eight American citizens and two dual US and Russian nationals are being held by Moscow, according to ABC. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, said on Tuesday that dialogue on the cases is continuing through intelligence service channels, that Hubbard’s name was “certainly familiar,” and that he had “nothing to report.”

Hubbard’s case arrived in the Oval Office on a day when Trump was also pressing Kyiv. “Ukraine has to want to settle this war,” he said, arguing that Moscow has the upper hand because “Russia is a big machine, they just keep grinding forward.” Since Trump and Putin last spoke by phone on October 9, the administration has eased sanctions on Moscow and increased pressure on Ukraine to settle. Whether a prisoner release becomes the first concrete product of that approach is the question the president told reporters to ask him again in a couple of days.

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