Russian President Vladimir Putin has opened talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on possible steps to end the war in Ukraine, one day after the American envoy held discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Russian state media said the meeting began at the Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg.
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The agencies reported that Mr Putin thanked US President Donald Trump for his efforts to resolve the conflict and said Moscow was interested in rebuilding economic ties with Washington.
According to Interfax and TASS, Mr Witkoff said the conditions for a ceasefire existed and expressed hope that Mr Putin would consider restarting three-way negotiations involving Russia, the United States and Ukraine.
Mr Hubbard, a retired schoolteacher, was sentenced after being convicted of serving in a Ukrainian territorial defence unit that opposed Russian forces. Prosecutors said he had been assigned to guard a checkpoint.
He rejected the allegation.
US President Donald Trump said on his Truth Social platform that Mr Hubbard had been freed from prison.
Mr Trump added that the United States had not been required to offer anything in exchange for his release.
Mr Witkoff arrived in Russia from Norway, where he had met Mr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials.
Vladimir Putin, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov (3rd L) and Russia’s presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev (R) attend a meeting with US special envoy Steve Witkoff (2nd R)
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the talks in Oslo “positive”.
“It was positive, nothing unexpected, nothing surprising, and he’ll [Witkoff] now, armed with those ideas, be able to go to St Petersburg and share them with the Russian side – and let’s see if we can make some progress,” Mr Rubio said while speaking in India.
Mr Rubio also said Washington had not been informed in advance about a slowdown affecting the SpaceX satellite communications network used by Ukraine to support operations on the battlefield.
“The president has nothing to do with the decisions that are made by Starlink and Starshield and by Mr Musk,” Mr Rubio said in Mumbai.
“That’s a private company; the president doesn’t run that company and can’t direct that company to do anything… I’m telling you, there was no foreknowledge.”
Two people died when a high-rise apartment building in Kyiv was hit by a Russian drone
Separately, four people were killed in a series of Russian attacks across Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Sergiy Koretsky said a drone strike on a 24-storey apartment building in Kyiv killed two people, while two more died in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Oleg Synegubov, head of the Kharkiv regional state administration, said the victims were an 81-year-old man and an 83-year-old woman. Emergency workers recovered their bodies from the rubble after their home was destroyed.
Other attacks struck a university building in the central city of Kremenchuk, as well as energy infrastructure in Kyiv, Volyn in the northwest, and Odesa and Mykolaiv in the south.
Mr Koretsky also reported that a drone had targeted a merchant vessel in the Black Sea.
Power company DTEK said emergency outages had been introduced in three areas of Kyiv, while scheduled cuts remained in effect in other parts of the capital.
