A White House meeting days after a homecoming
President Trump plans to receive Stephen Hubbard at the White House on Friday, according to sources familiar with the arrangements who spoke to CBS News. Hubbard is the American who returned to the United States last week after a long imprisonment in Russia.
CBS News described its report as a developing story that would be updated. Its initial account did not say what Trump and Hubbard would discuss, or whether the meeting would be open to the press.
Who Stephen Hubbard is
Hubbard is 74 and a retired teacher, CBS News reported. Russian authorities held him for more than four years after accusing him of fighting as a mercenary on Ukraine's behalf.
The network's report does not lay out the evidence behind that accusation, and it does not describe how Hubbard has fared since getting home.
How the release came about
News of Hubbard's release came during a meeting in St. Petersburg between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy, according to CBS News.
Trump has said the arrangement was not a "swap." He did, however, appear to connect Hubbard's freedom to his choice to exempt Russia from sanctions that Congress had passed, CBS News reported.
Speaking to reporters last week, the president said, "We were in the midst of negotiating." He then described critics who had pressed him to impose sanctions on Russia as people who do not understand how life works. By his account, penalizing Moscow while talks to bring back a long-held hostage were underway would have jeopardized the effort. He said that if he had done so, "you would not have Mr. Hubbard coming back."
According to CBS News, the president has not put those sanctions into effect since Hubbard's release.
What remains unclear
The reporting leaves several questions open. It does not say whether the administration plans to change its stance on the sanctions now that Hubbard is home. It also does not say what, if anything, Russia received in return for his release beyond the sanctions exemption Trump described.
Cases of Americans held in Russia have been a persistent concern in relations between the two countries, and CBS News has published a separate overview of the Americans who remain imprisoned there. Whether Friday's meeting leads to any new effort on behalf of those prisoners was not addressed in the source reporting.
For now, the confirmed facts are limited: Hubbard is back in the United States, Trump is expected to meet him in Washington, and the sanctions Trump spared Russia from remain unenforced.
