President Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he has personally raised the case of Stephen Hubbard — the 74-year-old retired American schoolteacher sitting in a Russian penal colony — with Vladimir Putin, and he strongly hinted that news in the case is coming within days.
“Just stick with me,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “I don’t want to talk about it, but everybody has been after Hubbard for a long time, long before I got here. And just remember that question for a couple of days from now, okay? Because I do things that nobody else can do.” He added: “Watch what happens. We have been focused on Hubbard.” U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is heading to Moscow this week, and according to people familiar with the matter, he will raise Hubbard’s possible release directly with Putin.
Hubbard’s story is one of the strangest of the war. He grew up in Big Rapids, Michigan, served in the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard, earned a master’s degree in English, and taught in Japan for 25 years before living in Cyprus and settling in 2014 in Izium, in eastern Ukraine, with a Ukrainian partner. His sister, Patricia Hubbard Fox, has said he lived on a pension of about $300 a month and that the siblings last spoke in September 2021.
When Russia seized Izium in April 2022, Hubbard was detained. Russian state media alleged he had been manning a Ukrainian military checkpoint — a claim Reuters could not independently establish. His sister recognized him in videos that surfaced afterward: in one he was questioned about his views on Putin and the war; in another he appeared with his hands bound, being struck with a sandal.
After a closed trial in Moscow, Hubbard was convicted in October 2024 of acting as a mercenary and sentenced to six years and ten months in a penal colony. Prosecutors claimed he had joined a Ukrainian territorial defence unit, received training, weapons and ammunition, and been promised $1,000 a month; Russian state media said he pleaded guilty. Both his family and his U.S.-based lawyer, Martin De Luca, reject the case against him. De Luca says Hubbard told him the charges are false and that Russian soldiers simply grabbed him from his house. His sister has questioned the reported confession, noting her brother held pro-Russian views and was unlikely to have taken up arms in his seventies.
Since his conviction, Hubbard has been moved through at least five Russian detention facilities before his legal team finally located him in the Mordovia region, east of Moscow. In January 2025 the United States formally designated him wrongfully detained, and the State Department says Russia has refused American officials consular access to him. Trump had already raised Hubbard’s release with Putin once before, in October 2025 — but this time he is telling reporters to mark their calendars.
The Hubbard remarks came in the same Oval Office session where Trump turned up the pressure on Ukraine to end the war, as Witkoff prepared to travel to Moscow after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo. “Ukraine has to want to settle this war,” Trump said, arguing that Moscow holds the upper hand because “Russia is a big machine — they just keep grinding forward, and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve taken a very large piece of land.”
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