A retired American schoolteacher who once taught English in Cyprus has arrived back in the United States after Russian President Vladimir Putin released him from detention at the start of talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
Stephen Hubbard, 74, had been serving a sentence of six years and 10 months after a Moscow court convicted him of being a mercenary for Ukraine in October 2024, following a closed trial. Washington had designated him as wrongfully detained in January 2025, a step that allowed the US government to negotiate for his release.
Hubbard spent decades teaching English abroad, his sister Patricia Hubbard Fox told Reuters. After 25 years in Japan, he moved to Cyprus, where he also taught, and in 2014 settled in Izyum in eastern Ukraine with a Ukrainian partner.
By the time Fox last spoke to him, via Skype in September 2021, the couple had separated and he was living alone in the city on a pension of about $300 a month, with few ties to local people, she said.
Raised in Big Rapids, Michigan, Hubbard earned a master’s degree in English and served in the US Air Force and National Guard, according to military records cited by the New York Times.
Russian forces captured Izyum in April 2022, two months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When Ukrainian troops retook the city that September, Hubbard was already in Russian custody.
Russian state media, citing a prosecutor, said Russian soldiers detained him on 2 April 2022, and alleged he had been manning a Ukrainian military checkpoint. Reuters said it could not independently establish the circumstances of his capture.
Prosecutors said Hubbard signed a contract with a territorial defence unit in Izyum at the start of the war in February 2022, received training, weapons and ammunition, and was promised $1,000 a month. Russia’s RIA news agency reported that he told the Moscow City Court he agreed with the indictment.
His family disputed the reported confession. “He is so non-military,” Fox told Reuters, describing her brother as closer to a pacifist who had never owned a gun. She said he held pro-Russian views and was unlikely to have taken up arms in his seventies.
His US-based lawyer, Martin De Luca, told Reuters in June 2025 that Hubbard had called the charges false and said he had not served in any combat or military unit. According to De Luca, Hubbard said Russian soldiers had simply taken him from his house.
Fox said she recognised her brother in a YouTube video, posted in May 2022, in which a man is questioned about his views on Putin and the war and says he understands why Putin sent troops into Ukraine. A separate video showed him with his hands bound, being struck with a sandal. Reuters said it could not verify when or where either video was recorded.
The State Department said Russia refused to grant US officials consular access while he was held. The New York Times reported in February 2025 that Hubbard had been moved through at least five Russian detention centres before his trial, and De Luca said the legal team learned only in April 2025 that he was being held at a facility in the Mordovia region, east of Moscow.
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