Russian President Vladimir Putin spent his cheapest form of diplomatic currency to earn some more political capital in his game of poker with the White House again this week by releasing the US citizen Stephen Hubbard from a Russian jail.
The Russian authorities handed the 74-year-old ex-serviceman, who had been captured working as a sniper for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), to US special envoy Steve Witkoff on October 21. Witkoff was in St Petersburg to discuss the terms of a possible ceasefire in the Ukraine war with Vladimir Putin, where it appears another serious attempt is being made to end the four-year old conflict.
Unusually, US President Donald Trump said no exchange had been required and that Washington gave nothing in return. But Putin gives up nothing for free and has been pressuring Trump to withdraw his military support of Ukraine in the hopes it will surrender to Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview with Bloomberg on October 18.
Hubbard, born in Michigan, is a retired schoolteacher who served in the US National Guard and the Air Force. Russian forces detained him in eastern Ukraine shortly after the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Russian prosecutors said he had manned a checkpoint and was fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine.
A closed Moscow court sentenced him in October 2024 to six years and ten months in a penal colony. His family have always rejected the charge, describing him as a pacifist who had never owned a gun. The US State Department classified him as wrongfully detained - the last American in Russia to carry that designation.
He was taken to Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg and was expected to fly to Texas for treatment at a military hospital. He is in poor health after four years in Russian custody.
Witkoff thanked Putin directly. "Because of you, he's going home to his family," he told the Russian president, adding: "You are a humanitarian, sir.”
The prisoner release comes in a month where relations between the Kremlin and the White House seem especially warm. Trump and Putin had an extremely warm conversation on October 8 where they agreed on a diesel deal and the easing of some sanctions on Russia’s oil trade that was widely condemned by both Kyiv and Brussels. Trump then signed off on a six-month sanctions waiver dated from October 7, Putin’s birthday. Putin replies by giving the prisoners away for free.
Prisoners are currency
Prisoners are a currency that the Kremlin trades in. They are used as the legal tender to cut deals with the Ukrainian and Western governments to concessions that the Kremlin can’t wring out of their opposites by diplomatic means alone. And since Putin has been in offices dozens of these deals have been cut. For most of the past four years Moscow traded prisoners the way it trades anything else: it wanted something back, and usually something specific - a Russian citizen in a Western jail, preferably an intelligence asset. But that pattern has started to change during the Trump administration.
Twice in three months the Kremlin has released an American without a publicly announced barter deal. The cost to Putin appears limited: an elderly teacher in a penal colony has little apparent military value, while a release timed to a visit by a US envoy can generate favourable headlines in Washington and goodwill that is deposited in his political capital purse.
The model now has a template. And in his poker game, the White House is a willing participant. Trump's special envoy for Belarus, John Coale, used prisoners-for-sanctions with Alexander Lukashenko, winning the release of around 300 political prisoners in return for lifting restrictions on Belarusian enterprises. Trump backed applying the same formula to Russia at the start of October, according to The Atlantic, a plan that would mark a sharp turn in Washington's Russia policy and could open the way to deals in Russian oil, diesel and rare earths.
What Moscow is buying is not sanctions relief alone. It is the Trump administration's weight in the peace talks - and the judgement, in the White House, that Putin is a man who you can do business with.
US prisoner swaps
The releases and exchanges that were tactical rather than humanitarian, in order:
September 2022 - Azovstal for Medvedchuk: Ukraine got back 215 prisoners, including the Azov commanders who had held out at the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol. Russia got 55 of its own plus Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin's closest ally in Ukrainian politics and the godfather to his daughter. The senior Ukrainians were flown to Turkey and held there. Russian hardliners were furious, which was itself the point: Putin had shown he would spend domestic political capital to get a personal friend home.
December 2022 - Griner for Bout: Basketball player Brittney Griner, arrested over cannabis oil in her luggage, was traded for Viktor Bout, the arms dealer known as the Merchant of Death and serving 25 years in the United States. Washington took the criticism; Moscow took the asset.
August 2024 - the big one: The largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War last August returned Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan and Radio Free Europe's Alsu Kurmasheva to the United States. Russia got back Vadim Krasikov, an FSB officer serving life in Germany for a murder in a Berlin park. Berlin had resisted for years. Moscow had correctly judged that enough Western governments wanted their own people home.
Journalist Evan Gershkovich was arrested by the FSB in March 2023, in Yekaterinburg while on assignment — the first US reporter held on espionage charges since the Cold War. He was sentenced to 16 years for spying but freed on 1 August 2024 after 16 months in custody, in a multi-country prisoner swap.
February 2025 - Marc Fogel: The history teacher, jailed over medical cannabis, was released and presented by the new Trump administration as a show of good faith. It was the first of the Trump-era releases and set the tone: a gesture, timed to an envoy's visit.
April 2025 - Karelina for Petrov: Ksenia Karelina, a dual US-Russian national serving 12 years for treason over a small donation to a Ukrainian charity, was exchanged for Arthur Petrov, a Russian accused by US authorities of export-control violations. This was still a trade, and the last of its kind so far.
August 2026 - Robert Gilman: The former US Marine, four years into a Russian sentence, was released on what Moscow called humanitarian grounds after a direct appeal from Trump to Putin. Nothing was given in return. This was the first true gift.
October 2026 - Stephen Hubbard: The second gift, five days after a sanctions waiver and in the room with the envoy carrying a peace framework from Oslo to Moscow.
Ukrainian prisoner swaps:
The same trade in POWs is part of the war in Ukraine, if less visibly. Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners steadily through the war - several hundred at a time, repeatedly timed to religious holidays, to rounds of talks, or to moments when Moscow wanted to look constructive. The deals are designed to show some colour on the Kremlin’s face to an international order.
May 2025 - the thousand: Russia and Ukraine exchanged 1,000 prisoners each after the first direct talks between them in three years, held in Istanbul. It was the largest swap of the war and it was agreed in the room, as the deliverable that allowed both sides to say the talks had produced something. Ukrainian families complained that the lists were light on Azov fighters and civilians.
August 2025 – the 300: Close to 300 prisoners were swapped in May that year and another round of 160 were exchange subsequently.
Kyiv has little choice but to take part, which is what makes the mechanism useful to Moscow. Every exchange is a humanitarian goodwill gesture that Ukraine cannot refuse and that Putin can schedule for maximum impact.
Saving for a rainy day
So, what is Putin saving up for? How will he spend this political capital? Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Moscow would be ready to resume talks in mid-November, and a trilateral meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping has been floated for the APEC summit in China next month.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who met Witkoff in Norway the day before Hubbard was freed, warned that if the United States ends up supporting Putin it would be a "tragedy".
Hubbard was the last American in Russia designated as wrongfully detained, but he was not the last American in Russian custody. As many as ten remain, among them Aleksandr Antonov, arrested last year and sentenced to six years, whose family have asked the State Department to prioritise his case. Robert Gilman's release in August came the same way Hubbard's did, through a direct appeal rather than a trade.
And for Putin, these ten detainees remain cash in the bank.