The US teacher released from a Russian prison this week was singled out behind bars because he’s American — facing heinous physical and sexual abuse, including being forced to crawl around like a dog, according to a report.
“They treated us worse than animals,” Ihor Shishko, a former Ukrainian prisoner jailed alongside Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired teacher from Michigan, said of the hellish conditions they endured inside the Russian lockup.
Hubbard was freed on Wednesday following negotiations between the US and Moscow after being jailed for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
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US envoy Steve Witkoff, who was visting St. Petersburg at the time, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian,” after Hubbard’s release.
“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir,” Witkoff told the Russian leader.
However, Hubbard was horrifically beaten, electrically shocked, and sexually assaulted while behind bars, according to Ihor Shishko, a former Ukrainian prisoner who was jailed alongside the teacher in the Bryansk region of western Russia, the Times reported.
The former prisoner, who now runs a veteran’s rehabilitation center in northeast Ukraine, blasted Witkoff’s flattery of Putin as a “humanitarian” as “shameful and despicable.”
Shishko claimed Hubbard was forced to crawl around prison like a dog, faced electric shock torture, and sexual abuse involving genital touching games in exchange for food, Shishko told the outlet.
He added that he bandaged Hubbard’s knees after his skin rubbed away from being forced to crawl on the floor while he served a seven-year sentence in the frigid, highly cramped prison.
“How you can refer to that as humanitarianism in any sense is just totally baffling, like it’s some sort of political game. If Steve Witkoff didn’t know what was done to Stephen and us, he should have known,’ Shishko said.
Shishko said that prison guards appeared to single out Hubbard for being an American.
“It was to show us our place, to show that they hated us, and for their own pleasure. It was every day, 365 days a year,” he said. “Every time there was a rotation of guards and they heard there was an American there, it was like, ‘where is the American? Bring him here’. And they were more harsh in his case because he was unusual.”
Hubbard also faced severe social isolation since he spoke no Russian or Ukrainian, Shishko said.
“For Stephen, it was mentally harder too because he didn’t understand why he was being held,” said Shishko. “The Ukrainians more or less had accepted their fate, but he always tried to explain why he shouldn’t be here and that he had rights.
“It was 100 percent clear to us that Stephen had never been a soldier and that was very obvious.”
Hubbard, a US Air Force veteran, taught English overseas and retired to Cyprus in 2012. He later moved to Ukraine to be with a woman he had met and remained in the country after the relationship ended, his lawyers have said.
Prosecutors argued that Hubbard signed a contract with the Ukrainian military after Russia’s invasion in 2022, fighting with Kyiv until he was captured two months later in April.
