Russia on Wednesday released a 74-year-old American teacher after holding him as a prisoner for more than four years. He had been convicted of working for Ukraine as a mercenary, charges that the United States said were fabricated.
The teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, was the only American in Russia considered “wrongfully detained” by the State Department and the only one to have been captured in Ukraine during the war and taken to Russia. His release came after President Trump, who has been easing American sanctions on Moscow, appealed directly to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Here’s how Mr. Hubbard became an unlikely pawn in an international conflict.
How did he end up in Ukraine?
Mr. Hubbard grew up in Big Rapids, a small Michigan city, with his mother and sister. As a young man, he enlisted in the Air Force and then the National Guard but did not stay long in either. His first marriage, at 20, fell apart, and his second marriage took him to Japan in the mid-1980s. There, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. He became sympathetic toward Russia.
After his second marriage ended, Mr. Hubbard moved to Cyprus, where a son from his first marriage lived and where he fell in love with a Ukrainian woman. The couple moved to Izium, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, where Mr. Hubbard taught English online.
Mr. Hubbard was a solitary man, family members said. He avoided email and social media, and he was suspicious of potential government surveillance. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Hubbard sent family members updates about his daily activities, which included searching for food and going to church. In text messages with a son of his who lives in Japan, he gave no indication that he had joined the Ukrainian military.
How was he captured?
Russian forces captured Mr. Hubbard, then 70, just weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
The circumstances of his arrest are murky, but the Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had been arrested at the home of an acquaintance and that he had been manning a military checkpoint. The Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had joined a regional territorial unit to defend Ukraine and that he received training, weapons, ammunition and $1,000 a month.
In October 2024, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Hubbard to six years and 10 months in a penal colony on charges of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine. Russian state news agencies reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charges.
Where was he held?
Mr. Hubbard was first held at a detention camp near the Russia-Ukraine border and later imprisoned in at least five different Russian detention centers. At times, his family had no idea where he was and the United States Embassy had no access to him. The New York Times pieced together accounts from fellow prisoners of war to trace where he had been held.
Unlike other Americans held in the Russian prison system, Mr. Hubbard, who spoke neither Ukrainian nor Russian, was kept in the general population, his lawyers said. Ukrainian prisoners of war who were held with Mr. Hubbard said that he had been repeatedly tortured because he was an American — beaten, forced to stand all day, given little food and poor medical care.
In May 2025, Mr. Hubbard was allowed to call his son in Cyprus, Joseph Coleman. In an interview, Mr. Coleman said that he had spoken for about a minute with his father, who initially sounded like he was in good spirits.
“But then somewhere in the middle it turned and you could you could hear the frustration in his voice,” Mr. Coleman recalled. “You could hear maybe a slight lack of hope.”
Mr. Coleman, who is a Greek Orthodox priest, wrote a long letter to Mr. Putin in September, emphasizing his Orthodox faith and pleading for his father’s release.
“My father is not a man of violence,” Mr. Coleman wrote. “He is a teacher and a peace-loving man, and above all he is my father.”
Why was he released?
Mr. Putin announced his decision to release Mr. Hubbard during a meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday.
Russia released Mr. Hubbard unilaterally, rather than in a prisoner swap — suggesting that for Mr. Putin, the American prisoner’s value had changed from a pawn in negotiations to a symbol of his renewed relationship with Mr. Trump.
In the days before Mr. Hubbard’s release, relations between the White House and Ukraine had frayed, with Mr. Trump moving to buy Russian diesel, lifting sanctions on Moscow and pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries.
Mr. Hubbard, who is in fragile health, will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment. His sister planned to travel to Texas to meet him. Mr. Coleman and another of Mr. Hubbard’s sons, the one who lives in Japan, also flew to the United States to be with their father.
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