Russia has released Stephen Hubbard, the 74-year-old retired American schoolteacher held in Russian custody since April 2022. Hubbard was freed in St. Petersburg on Wednesday and taken to the city's Pulkovo Airport to fly home to the United States — released after President Donald Trump personally asked Vladimir Putin to let him go, with no prisoner swap and nothing given in return.
The release was announced at the start of Putin's meeting in St. Petersburg with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, who had landed in the city that morning for talks on ending the war in Ukraine and was met at the airport by Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev. Putin told Witkoff that Hubbard had been freed and was already at Pulkovo Airport waiting for his flight. Witkoff thanked him in front of the cameras: "The president sends his thanks, our whole nation sends their thanks, because of Stephen Hubbard. Because of you, he's going home to his family."
Trump confirmed the release himself, saying he had asked Putin to free Hubbard during a telephone call last week. "Stephen is on his way back home and will soon be with his family," Trump wrote. The United States "was not required to give anything in return — an unprecedented situation for Russia," he added. "There was no 'swap' necessary for this release."
The release came almost exactly on the schedule Trump had hinted at a day earlier. On Tuesday, in the Oval Office, the president told reporters he had personally raised Hubbard's case with Putin: "Just stick with me. 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." By the next morning, Hubbard was a free man.
Trump said his decision last week to hold off new, severe sanctions on Russia kept the path to the release open: "If sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt." The sanctions decision had drawn criticism from several U.S. lawmakers; on Wednesday it had produced the outcome the president had promised — an American coming home.
Hubbard's first stop back in American care is medical. U.S. officials said he would be flown to Texas to receive treatment at a military hospital — his health has declined over more than four years in Russian detention, and his family has raised concerns about his condition for years. His U.S.-based lawyer, Martin De Luca, thanked Trump, Witkoff and the other American officials who worked on the case, calling the release "a dividend earned along the hard road to peace."
Hubbard was the only American in Russia formally designated by the U.S. State Department as wrongfully detained, and he is the third American prisoner brought home during Trump's second term, after teacher Marc Fogel and former Marine Robert Gilman. As many as ten other Americans, including dual nationals, remain in Russian custody.
His story is one of the strangest of the war. Hubbard 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; the siblings last spoke in September 2021.
When Russian forces seized Izium in April 2022, Hubbard was detained. Prosecutors later alleged he had been manning a Ukrainian military checkpoint — a claim that has never been independently verified. 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 officials said he pleaded guilty. Both his family and 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 called her brother "so non-military," questioned the reported confession, and noted that he held pro-Russian views and was unlikely to have taken up arms in his seventies.
Since his conviction, Hubbard was 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 refused American officials consular access to him throughout. Trump had raised Hubbard's release with Putin once before, in October 2025 — but this week he told reporters to mark their calendars, and this time the answer came within a day.
Never miss a story.
Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it’s published.
Join Telegram Channel