Russia has released a retired American teacher who had been imprisoned on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump said Oct. 21 after U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure the release.
Witkoff revealed Stephen Hubbard, a native of Michigan, had been freed during talks with Putin in St. Petersburg to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
“Our whole nation sends their thanks because of Stephen Hubbard—because of you, he’s going home to his family,” Witkoff told Putin during the meeting.
Putin said that the former educator was already at Pulkovo Airport in the city, ready to depart Russia, state news agency TASS reported.
Witkoff thanked Putin for releasing the 74-year-old and confirmed he planned to meet with him at the airport.
Hubbard’s release comes after Trump said he had asked the Russian president to set him free while speaking with reporters in the Oval Office on Oct. 20.
Asked about the case of the teacher, Trump said he didn’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, OK? Because I do things that nobody else can do,” he said, adding people should “watch what happens.”
Following Hubbard’s release, Trump said it was secured without the United States needing to give anything in return, calling it an “unprecedented situation for Russia,” in an Oct. 21 post on Truth Social.
“There was no ‘swap’ necessary for this release. This major return should have taken place long ago through the Biden Administration, which got nowhere in its negotiations with the Kremlin,” the president said, adding that Hubbard is “on his way back home.”
In a follow-up post, Trump said that numerous people who called for sanctions to be immediately imposed on Moscow have since called to apologize to him, saying that “they didn’t know that he was negotiating the release.”
The president said that if those sanctions had been put in place, the negotiations to liberate the teacher would have “come to a complete and total halt.”
Hubbard was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison by Russian authorities in 2024, after being convicted of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
He was alleged to have fought alongside Kyiv’s forces for two months before he was captured by Russian troops.
Investigators said he was paid $1,000 per month to serve in a Ukrainian territorial defense unit in the eastern city of Izyum, where he had been living since 2014.
Hubbard was the first American known to have been convicted on charges of fighting as a mercenary in the Ukrainian conflict.
His release follows the Trump administration securing the freedom of U.S. citizen and former Marine Robert Gilman in August.
Gilman, originally from Massachusetts, spent four years behind Russian bars after being arrested and convicted of causing a disturbance while drunk on a passenger train and then assaulting a police officer while in custody in 2022.
While still serving that sentence, he was also convicted in 2024 of another count of assaulting law enforcement officers.
The sentence for his second offence, which extended his 3 1/2-year sentence to more than a decade, was handed down the same day as Hubbard’s sentence for fighting as a mercenary.
Gilman, 32, who became a teacher after leaving the military, returned to the United States on Aug. 11, with his family saying this four-year stint in a Russian prison had left him allegedly near death.
Since his release, Gilman has given no public statements.
