Russia frees Stephen Hubbard, the American teacher held since 2022, as Witkoff meets Putin in St Petersburg

The announcement came before the talks on Ukraine had properly begun.

President Vladimir Putin opened his meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff at the Constantine Palace in St Petersburg on Wednesday by announcing that Stephen Hubbard had been freed from prison and taken to the city's Pulkovo airport. "I wanted to thank you very much. The president sends his thanks. Our whole nation sends its thanks," Witkoff told Putin in the televised opening. "Because of you, he's going home to his family." Hubbard's American lawyer, Martin De Luca, thanked President Donald Trump, Witkoff and other US officials in a statement and called the release "a dividend earned along the hard road to peace." Trump confirmed the release in a post on Truth Social and said the United States was not required to give anything in return. CBS News reported that Hubbard, who is in poor health, will fly to Texas for treatment at a military hospital.

Hubbard, 74, grew up in Big Rapids, Michigan, served in the US Air Force and the National Guard, and taught English in Japan for 25 years before moving in 2014 to Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, with a Ukrainian partner. Russian forces took the city in April 2022 and detained him there. Prosecutors alleged that he had signed up with a Ukrainian territorial defence unit, received training and weapons and manned a checkpoint, for a promised 1,000 dollars a month. A closed trial convicted him of mercenary activity and sentenced him to six years and ten months. Russian state media reported that he pleaded guilty. De Luca has told Reuters that Hubbard said the charges were false and that he was never in any combat or military unit, and Hubbard's sister, Patricia Fox Hubbard, told Reuters in 2024 that her brother was "so non military" and subsisted on a pension of about 300 dollars a month. At the time of his release he was the only American prisoner in Russia designated by Washington as wrongfully detained.

The release was the product the president had trailed a day earlier. In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump told reporters he had been talking to Putin about Hubbard at length and had asked him to let the man go. On Wednesday the envoy who carried the request was sitting across the table from Putin, one day after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo with British, French, German and Polish representatives present. Witkoff told Putin the Oslo summit had been productive, said he hoped the St Petersburg talks would be another step forward in the peace process, and asked him to consider resuming trilateral talks among Russia, the United States and Ukraine. Putin expressed interest in restoring economic cooperation with the United States and raised the possibility of a meeting with China to discuss Ukraine. The agenda also covered possible Russian fertilizer exports and Russian help on the war in Iran. Jared Kushner was expected to join part of the meeting remotely because he has the flu, CNN reported. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking on Tuesday, had set the tone from the other side: Moscow will see what Witkoff brings, will make no political concessions, and does not expect a miracle.

The diesel deal ran through the same room. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Wednesday that Russia will dispatch its first tanker of diesel for the United States on Thursday, carrying 40,000 metric tons, with the paperwork nearly complete. Russia lifted its self imposed ban on diesel exports on October 9 under the agreement with Trump, who has said Russia would supply 300,000 metric tons at once, then 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons after that. Putin told Witkoff that diesel prices dropped after the agreement. The deal is also what broke relations between Washington and Kyiv: the United States has waived sanctions on Russia and, Kyiv says, has slowed the satellite links and missile warnings its forces depend on, while Trump has told Zelensky to find somebody else to negotiate. On Wednesday, one American came home out of that bargain, as of October 21.

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