There is a lot happening on the Russia-Ukraine front right now, and President Trump is celebrating a win.

However, with news very much in flux, we should break down the facts from the speculation. So let’s look at what we actually know.

1) American Stephen Hubbard has been released by Russia.
President Trump had teased this just yesterday, and Russia has freed Stephen Hubbard, a retired American teacher who was “convicted” of being a mercenary fighting for Ukraine. Hubbard is 74 years old, and he was grabbed by Russia in 2022 at the beginning of the war.

Hubbard, who is in bad health, had been in Russian custody since he was nabbed from his home in Izyum, Ukraine, by Russian forces in April 2022.

The detention occurred just over a month after Russia’s large-scale invasion on its neighbor and the week Russia took occupation of the Kharkiv Oblast region for six months.

He had been living in the Ukrainian city of Izyum since 2014 and was accused of having signed up to be a mercenary with a Ukrainian territorial defense unit where he was allegedly promised $1,000 per month.

Hubbard’s family denied the accusations, saying he had shared pro-Russian sentiments and wouldn’t arm himself because of his age.

“He is so non-military,” his sister Patricia Hubbard Fox told Reuters by phone last month. “He never had a gun, owned a gun, done any of that…He’s more of a pacifist.”

Hubbard was sentenced to 6 years and 10 months in prison after he was convicted of the mercenary charge during a closed trial in Oct. 2024.

He was allegedly transferred around to several prisons before he wound up at a detention complex in the Mordovia region, east of Moscow, his lawyers told Reuters.

The US State Department designated Hubbard’s capture as wrongful in January 2025, allowing for government officials to start negotiations for his release.

Hubbard is apparently the last American considered “wrongfully detained” in Russia by the State Department. It would be best if it could stay that way.

2) Steve Witkoff digustingly sucked up to Vladimir Putin in the process of getting Hubbard released.
Look, we all know that Putin is an insecure narcissist who considers himself on level with the tsars, but this is just vomit-inducing.

Come ON. https://t.co/JX7SzJFcXn

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) October 21, 2026

There has to be a way to diplomatically placate Putin, without the need to tell Steve Witkoff to get a room if the tongue bath is going to be THAT extensive.

3) Secretary of State Marco Rubio is very much fed up with Volodymyr Zelensky.
If Rubio is saying this out loud, one can imagine what Trump is saying behind closed doors.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2112892680074108996

Speaking to reporters amid growing tensions between Washington and Kyiv, Rubio shot down accusations the Trump administration is responsible for Ukraine’s war casualties.

“I don’t know who this official was in the Ukrainian government that went around saying that a bunch of people had died as a result of what America was denying them,” Rubio said.

“No country in the world has done more to help Ukraine over the last four and a half years in the United States, including under the Trump administration.”

Rubio’s remarks followed complaints from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who alleged that Ukraine had missed American intelligence warnings about incoming Russian ballistic missiles.

“We have dozens of countries who help,” Zelensky told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “But only [the] United States has this unique intelligence to tell our side when Russia uses ballistic missiles. And we didn’t get it.”

Rubio rejected those accusations, insisting that the United States had not suspended intelligence sharing.

Zelensky’s frustration is understandable, considering Trump’s disel fuel deal with Russia and the slowdown/suspension/something of Starshield (the United States owned military/government version of Starlink). One cannot forget that Ukraine is the victim, not the aggressor, in this war. However, Rubio’s comments should serve as a warning to Zelensky – don’t trash or blame the ally who has funded your national defense to the tune of $68.2 billion since this war began.

4) Putin now says he’s ready to negotiate – again.
We’ve heard this before, but Putin says he’s willing to talk.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to return to trilateral negotiations with the US and Ukraine to end its war, a Kremlin official told reporters Wednesday.

Moscow’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said that Putin said “in principle” peace talks will continue after Nov. 10, following a meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg.

Witkoff met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders in Oslo, Norway, on Tuesday to weigh a proposal that laid out Kyiv’s security guarantees, economic recovery funds and other items, before heading to Russia to present the document to Putin.

Ushakov said Wednesday following the sitdown with Witkoff that future trilateral talks will focus on “building a security system for Russia and Ukraine after the conflict ends” — another item that was to be considered as part of the peace proposal, a source previously told The Post.

There’s a lot of wiggle room in those statements, so it would be prudent to not believe that Putin will send diplomats to negotiate unless they are actually sitting at a table, and preferably NOT wearing retro Soviet gear. Zelensky’s position is consistent – he has been willing to accept a “freezing” of the front lines in order to end the war with Russia.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Zelensky was pressed by co-host Brian Kilmeade on whether he would accept an agreement that effectively stopped the fighting where the battlefield stands today.

“Would you accept a peace deal that freezes everything the way it is right now, where you still keep 75% or more of your country?” Kilmeade asked.

“Yes,” Zelensky replied. “Right now, we have to freeze and I think this is [the] real way to end this war.”

He added: “We call it ceasefire or ‘stop killing’ as President Trump called it. Freeze and stop.”

Zelensky stressed that such a halt would be only the first step, arguing that any deal would need firm guarantees to prevent Russia from restarting the war: “And, of course, this is [the] minimum [of] what we need from Russia today. Then we will go to the president and Europeans and ask [for] security guarantees.”

Putin has dreams of reconsituting the Soviet Union, either by invasion (Ukraine) or by proxy (Belarus), and those guarantees would have to be ironclad in order to stop his fantasy world. The Russian economy is not thriving, and the war has only decimated the resources, not to mention the population.

Moscow plans to spend a record $200 billion on defense in 2027, about 35 percent of federal spending, while the government has doubled its 2026 deficit estimate to 3.2 percent of GDP.

The cushion is thinner, too. Oil and gas revenue fell 24 percent in 2025, to its lowest level since 2020, supplying about a quarter of federal income, against roughly half in 2014. The liquid part of the sovereign wealth fund has plunged since before the 2022 invasion, from about $113 billion to $47 billion. With foreign markets closed, the Kremlin borrows at home with the key rate at 14 percent; four in five regions spent more than they collected in 2025, and a record number cut healthcare spending in real terms.

Putin spent a decade building a fortress economy. Now he is strip-mining Russia’s future to fund the front.

Some of Russia’s demographic woes predate Putin, but the war has made them worse. Russia has suffered an estimated 1.4 million casualties since February 2022, including as many as 450,000 dead; the most losses for a major power since China’s during the Korean War. At least 650,000 people have fled Russia since the invasion, and Bloomberg estimates that the economy is short of at least 1.5 million workers.

So, what can we take away from the current state of events? Did the Trump administration manage to get Stephen Hubbard released in a combination of a disel fuel deal and ass-kissing? Possibly. Could the deal have softened up Putin (while antagonizing Zelensky) into considering trilateral talks? Maybe. Is Russia negotiating from a position of strength? No, but they would like everyone to think so. Is Zelensky both legitimately aggrieved and insulting his allies at the same time? Yes. Does anyone have a clue how this will end? Nope, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. President Trump has singular goals, and when he achieves them (like the release of Hubbard), it is a good thing, but not the only thing. This entire conflict has a lot of moving parts, and the Trump end goal of “peace” simply translates into “no more killing.” That’s not a very stable definition of peace, but it might be all that can be achieved between Russia and Ukraine, and if President Trump manages to get that far… then it will be a lot more than anyone else has gotten.

Featured image: President Donald Trump on March 5, 2026, official White House photo by Daniel Torok on the White House Flickr account, cropped, public domain