A conservative editorial board threw cold water on one of President Donald Trump's latest diplomatic wins, warning his team was getting played.
The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote Wednesday that there is "no cause to be grateful" to Russian President Vladimir Putin for freeing Stephen Hubbard, a retired American teacher jailed in Russia since 2022. Trump said Wednesday that Putin let Hubbard go after a personal plea from the president and asked for nothing in return.
The board welcomed Hubbard home but argued the Russian leader "takes Western hostages as part of his statecraft." The editorial laid out a pattern. Putin seizes someone, slaps them with bogus charges, secures a conviction in a rigged court and then frees or swaps them whenever it suits him.
The board pointed to The Journal's own reporter, Evan Gershkovich, whom Putin used as a bargaining chip to win back an assassin held in Germany. It also noted that Russian security services detained a Japanese reporter just last week, possibly to pressure Tokyo.
Putin didn't need anything new for Hubbard because he has "already been piling up concessions" from Trump while escalating his war on Ukraine, Europe and NATO, the editorial argued. Among them, the board listed loosened U.S. sanctions on diesel sales, waived sanctions in a bill from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and what its sources described as intermittent limits on Ukraine's access to Starlink.
The board also took aim at Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who told Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, "you are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that." The editorial dismissed the remark as a "rhetorical smooch," arguing that jailing a man on false charges for four years and then letting him go hardly earns that title.
Hubbard's homecoming shouldn't distract from what's at stake, the editorial warned. It accused Putin of bombarding women and children with missiles and drones every night, helping Iran target and kill Americans in the Middle East and seeking to help China fracture U.S. alliances in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific.