An American pensioner who was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison in October for “mercenary activity” was repeatedly tortured while being held alongside Ukrainian soldiers in Russian prisons in 2022–2023, The New York Times (NYT) reported on Sunday.
Stephen Hubbard, 72, a retired English teacher who since 2014 lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Izyum, was captured by Russian forces in April 2022 and moved to several detention centres before eventually being sentenced to six years and 10 months in a penal colony after a trial held behind closed doors.
Russian prosecutors accused Hubbard of joining the territorial defence forces in Izyum shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion, but Alyona Hryban, a civil servant in Izyum, told the NYT it was unlikely he had joined the territorial defence as “there were no old men there”, while Ihor Shyshko, a former Ukrainian POW and Hubbard’s former cellmate, said he had likely been attempting to escape the city when he was captured.
According to former Ukrainian POWs who were held in the same detention centres as Hubbard, he endured the same torture as they did, being repeatedly beaten, burned, electrocuted, terrorised by dogs, forced to stand all day and strip naked for more than a month at a time.
Shyshko, who said he shared a cell with Hubbard and 13 other men in a prison in Pakino in central Russia in 2023, admitted that Hubbard had been treated even worse than the Ukrainian inmates due to him being an American, adding that they had stormed in, “shouting in the hallway: ‘We know you’re an American. You’re dead here!’”
Guards at another prison in Novozybkov, in western Russia’s Bryansk region, where Hubbard was held briefly in mid-2022, repeatedly beat Hubbard and forced him to learn Russian words, Russian poets and the Russian national anthem, another former Ukrainian POW who went by the call sign Hacker told the NYT.
Russia has unjustly detained “an average of nine Americans” each year since 2022, a significant increase from previous years, a report by the US-based NGO The Foley Foundation revealed in July.
Several prisoners, including journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, were exchanged in a major swap with the West in August. Rumours circulated in the Russian media in December that another prisoner exchange was being planned for February, but there has been no public confirmation of that claim from either the Russian or US authorities.
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