Inside the grand Constantine Palace outside St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Steve Witkoff thanked Vladimir Putin for releasing Stephen Hubbard, 74, a retired Michigan schoolteacher who spent four years in Russian detention. President Donald Trump’s envoy then offered Putin the sort of praise the Kremlin craves.

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that,” Witkoff told Putin. The video circulated faster than Hubbard’s flight home.

Humanitarian is an extraordinarily generous description for a leader wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2023 over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Putin also launched a brutal war against Ukraine that has killed up to 600,000 amid countless allegations of torture, authoritarianism and cruelty by his government.

Moscow has portrayed the deportation of Ukrainian children as humanitarian, arguing that they could not remain in a war zone. Ukraine counts the children in the tens of thousands, although the true number and their treatment are difficult to verify.

According to Ukrainian sources, a few thousand children have returned home. The rhetorical formula remains brutally convenient: Ukraine and the West call it theft, while the Kremlin calls it rescue.

Hubbard’s case is more complicated than Witkoff’s glowing tribute suggested. He had reportedly lived in Ukraine since 2014 and joined a territorial defense unit in Izium after Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Russian forces captured Hubbard within months, and a Russian court sentenced him in 2024 to nearly seven years as a “mercenary.” Washington declared him wrongfully detained, while his relatives said he held views favorable to Russia and was too old to fight.

Nina Khrushcheva argues that Moscow would regard any foreigner serving in a Ukrainian unit as an enemy. She invokes George Kennan, the American diplomat who mentored her at Princeton in the 1990s and taught her to examine a country’s politics from its own perspective.

By the Kremlin’s own standards, releasing Hubbard qualified as a meaningful gesture. Khrushcheva notes that during Joseph Stalin’s era, someone in Hubbard’s situation would not have been pardoned but shot, which raises the unavoidable question of what Putin received.

Trump insisted there was “no swap.” Nobody was directly released in exchange for Hubbard, but five days before his freedom, the White House waived new sanctions on Russia, and Trump said Hubbard would not have been freed otherwise.

That makes the release look less like a burst of compassion than a down payment. Putin received sanctions relief, praise and a carefully staged photo opportunity, while the United States received one sick man who is 74.

Witkoff, a successful real estate figure, understood how to flatter the person across the table. Since his first visits in 2025, when he appeared with his hand pressed to his heart, he has grasped how Putin prefers to see himself.

The Constantine Palace offered an especially fitting backdrop. Peter the Great began it in 1720 but never finished it, and by 1945 only the walls remained standing before Putin had it rebuilt beginning in 2001 as a gilded presidential residence.

Western leaders once visited the palace for the G8 in 2006 and the G20 in 2013. Six months after the latter gathering, Russia annexed Crimea, which Khrushcheva describes as the opening act of the current war, and most Western leaders stopped coming.

Putin also resists the label of dictator. Alexander Lukashenko said last month that he and Putin often argue about which of them is the bigger dictator, a joke Lukashenko enjoys but one Putin regards as insulting.

Putin sees himself as a benevolent KGB major and even a democrat, pointing to Russia’s elections while criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for postponing an election during the war after his official term ended in 2024. The staged nature of Russian elections apparently does not disturb that flattering self portrait.

According to his rhetoric, Putin believes he is confronting not merely Ukraine but the entire West. His deepest conviction, Khrushcheva argues, is that he would behave more gently if circumstances permitted it, making him grateful whenever someone claims to see his softer side.

Witkoff identified that vanity and pressed directly on it, as effective negotiators often do. But Putin was hardly an ordinary client, and the result was lopsided: He collected policy relief and public praise, then surrendered one elderly prisoner.

Calling that humanitarian may have pleased the Kremlin. It does not erase the children, the war or the cruelty hidden beneath Putin’s preferred portrait of reluctant harshness.