Vladimir Putin opened his Wednesday meeting with Steve Witkoff at the Constantine Palace outside St. Petersburg by telling the envoy that Stephen Hubbard, the retired Michigan teacher Russia has held since April 2022, was already at Pulkovo Airport waiting for a flight home.
- Hubbard, 74, was seized in Izyum on April 2, 2022, and sentenced on October 7, 2024, to six years and ten months in a penal colony for “mercenary” activity. His family, the Ukrainians held alongside him and the State Department all call the charge fabricated, and he was the only American in Russia carrying the formal “wrongfully detained” designation.
- Witkoff thanked Putin for the release in the Kremlin’s own readout. Trump had said on Tuesday, “I’ve asked him to release him. Let’s see what happens.”
- No swap, no named Russian prisoner and no concession has been announced by either government as of Wednesday afternoon.
- ABC News reported on Monday that a deal to free several jailed Americans was in its “final stages,” and that “it’s not clear what Russia might receive in exchange.”
That last line is the story. Hubbard’s release is a good day for a family in Michigan that spent four and a half years waiting for it, and it is also a transaction, because every release Moscow has granted since 2024 has been one. The counterparties are known. The price is the part missing.
Here is the ledger. We built it from the public record of the last three times Russia let an American go, because nobody covering Wednesday’s news has put the four cases side by side.
| Date | Americans freed | What Russia got, and how fast it was public |
|---|---|---|
| August 1, 2024 | Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva, Vladimir Kara-Murza and 12 others | Eight Russians the same day, led by Vadim Krasikov, the FSB officer convicted in Berlin of a park assassination, plus two convicted cybercriminals and a family of spies from Slovenia |
| February 11, 2025 | Marc Fogel | Alexander Vinnik, the BTC-e money launderer, released from US custody and named by the Kremlin within a day |
| April 10, 2025 | Ksenia Karelina | Artur Petrov, charged with smuggling export-controlled US microelectronics to the Russian military, named the same day |
| October 21, 2026 | Stephen Hubbard | Nothing announced |
Three for three, Moscow collected a named asset and said so before the plane landed. On the fourth, silence. Read that as a gift and you have to believe Putin changed character sometime this autumn.
We do not believe that. We think the price was paid in advance, in public, and in a currency Ukraine is spending. On Thursday, October 16, Trump waived the sanctions and tariffs in the Lindsey O. Graham Act two days before they were due to bite, including the 500 percent tariff on Russian goods and the penalties on the five largest buyers of Russian oil. On Monday he told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine” and that Zelensky “is not helping matters much.” On Tuesday, Zelensky sat down with Witkoff in Oslo and emerged saying US intelligence sharing “works now,” which is the sentence you say after two weeks in which it did not. Then on Wednesday morning Hubbard was at the airport.
Sixteen senators led by Chuck Schumer wrote to Marco Rubio in August pressing for this release, and Republicans Jim Risch and Mike Crapo did the same during Hostage Week. Risch now chairs the committee that can ask Witkoff, under oath, what was on the table at the Constantine Palace. He should, this month, before the trilateral meeting Putin is already insisting happen in Moscow after a deal is signed, on terms Kyiv has not seen.
Was anyone swapped for Hubbard?
Not as far as either government has said. The Kremlin readout has Witkoff thanking Putin; it names no Russian being released from a US, European or Ukrainian prison. The three previous releases each named Moscow’s side of the trade within a day.
Who is still held in Russia?
ABC News counted at least eight US citizens and two dual nationals in Russian custody on Monday, among them Gordon Black, Robert Woodland, David Barnes, Michael Leake and Eugene Spector. None carries the “wrongfully detained” designation Hubbard had, which is the designation that obliges the State Department to negotiate.
What else did Witkoff and Putin discuss?
The Kremlin says the talks covered “key elements of a comprehensive peace framework,” security guarantees and post-war economics. Putin’s condition for meeting Zelensky is that it happen in Moscow once a deal is finalized, which Kyiv has called a nonstarter. Witkoff flew to St. Petersburg directly from the Oslo talks with Zelensky, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Store and Finland’s Alexander Stubb.
LNC covered the August 2024 exchange when it happened. The question that applied then applies now, in reverse: when the other side of the ledger is blank, who filled it in, and with what?