Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on October 21, 2026 the release of American Stephen Hubbard, 74, at the start of a meeting with White House special envoy Steve Witkoff at the Konstantinovsky Palace on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Hubbard had been detained since 2022 and was serving a sentence of nearly seven years in a penal colony, according to CBS News.
The meeting is part of a series of Witkoff visits to Russia to discuss proposals to end the war in Ukraine, including the possibility of trilateral talks among Kyiv, Washington and Moscow, according to Ukrinform. Witkoff arrived in St. Petersburg from Oslo, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and was received at Pulkovo airport by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev. For Mexico and Latin America, the episode describes a bilateral negotiating channel that is advancing outside the multilateral formats where the region usually sets out its position on Ukraine.
Hubbard, a native of Michigan and a retired teacher, was detained in 2022 in Izium, in eastern Ukraine, and convicted in 2024 after a closed trial on mercenarism charges. He was the last American with the State Department's formal wrongful detention designation, and as many as ten compatriots, including dual nationals, remained in Russian custody, according to CBS News. Witkoff thanked Putin during the meeting and said that, because of that decision, Hubbard was returning to his family; he also described the Russian leader as humanitarian, in remarks reported by the outlet. Trump said he had requested the release by phone the previous week and that nothing was given in exchange. Other earlier cases, such as those of Robert Gilman, Marc Fogel, Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, appear in the outlet's account.
In parallel, Putin indicated that the first shipment of Russian diesel to the United States would leave in two or three days, according to information released after the meeting. The next round of contacts and the timetable for those exports are the two indicators that will show whether the channel keeps producing results.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.