Steve Witkoff left St Petersburg on Wednesday with two things to show his boss: an American passenger on his plane and a Kremlin promise to come back to the negotiating table. After close to three hours with Vladimir Putin at the Constantine Palace, Russia said it was willing in principle to restart three-way talks with Washington and Kyiv from around 10 November.
The man on board was Stephen Hubbard, who used to teach and is now in his mid-seventies. Russian judges had convicted him of serving Ukraine as a hired soldier, and he spent upwards of four years in custody. A presidential pardon ended that, and Witkoff collected him in person at the city’s Pulkovo terminal. No prisoner went the other way. Donald Trump said he had raised the case with Putin himself and stressed that nothing was given in return. According to his sister, Hubbard had assumed he would never leave prison alive.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said the next round would deal with the core question of how Russia and Ukraine can be kept safe once the fighting stops. Witkoff had flown in from Oslo, where he met Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European officials the day before, carrying what he called papers with ideas for a peace deal. Moscow’s verdict on those proposals was cool: Ushakov judged they offered hardly anything useful. Jared Kushner joined by video because he was unwell.
The tone of the meeting raised eyebrows. Witkoff told Putin he was “a humanitarian” too, even though the Russian leader faces an International Criminal Court warrant over the deportation of Ukrainian children. Relations between Washington and Kyiv, meanwhile, remain strained by a row over restricted access to the Starshield satellite network.
Nobody is predicting a quick breakthrough. Moscow still demands all of Donetsk and keeps striking Ukrainian cities as winter nears. For now, Hubbard’s freedom looks mainly like a gift to Trump ahead of the midterm elections.
