Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say - The New York Times

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say

"Israel’s military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter.

Oct. 26, 2026Updated 9:34 p.m. ET

A campaign billboard in Tel Aviv depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump on Monday, the eve of Israel’s national election.Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter.

Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.

Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

The Israeli officials and the people briefed on the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale for pressing to attack Iran before the election was not clear, but a return to war could have potentially disrupted or even delayed the vote.

The behind-the-scenes tensions over a possible Israeli attack or other action against Iran come as Mr. Netanyahu has been publicly portraying the stakes of the election in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Over the weekend, he posted an A.I.-generated image on social media of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv and warned in a television appearance that the vote would decide “Israel’s existence.”

The appeals to Israelis’ fears are meant to get voters to see the conflict with Iran as the most urgent issue and to entrust him with continuing to lead the struggle against Israel’s chief regional adversary.

When Mr. Netanyahu pushed to heat up the conflict with Iran, General Zamir raised a number of objections and concerns and ultimately concluded that there was no immediate or urgent need for action, the officials and people briefed on the matter said.

Such a determination by the military chief carries special weight: It can make it harder to portray the timing as a military necessity.

While General Zamir was not opposed to taking action against Iran in principle, he objected to doing so before the election, according to an Israeli official and two people briefed on the matter. General Zamir and the Israeli air force commander, Maj. Gen. Omer Tischler, cited the political sensitivities  and the difficulty of explaining to the public why it had to occur then, according to two senior Israeli defense officials.

In a statement, the Israeli military said its operational decision making was strictly based “on security considerations,” as well as “its responsibility as a national institution.”

The concerns about political motivations for an attack on Iran do not expire on Tuesday. According to three senior Israeli defense officials and two people briefed on the matter, a resumption of fighting with Iran in the weeks after the election could also have a large impact.

If Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents prevail in the election, they would likely have an opportunity to form the new government, but a return to war could hinder or even thwart their ability to assemble a governing coalition within the time allotted by law. Renewed fighting could also create political pressure to establish a national unity government that includes Mr. Netanyahu.

Reports of disagreement between Mr. Netanyahu and the military over a possible attack, first carried by Israel’s Channel 12, sparked outrage in Israel. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s rivals, Avigdor Liberman, demanded Monday that the attorney general open an investigation into whether the prime minister had committed treason.

“The attempt to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including sacrificing Israeli soldiers, just because of the fear of losing the elections, is a betrayal of the nation,” Mr. Liberman, a defense minister and foreign minister in earlier Netanyahu governments, wrote in a formal complaint.

Mr. Netanyahu, 77, is battling to keep his hold on power in the face of opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff.

Mr. Netanyahu’s appeals to voters became increasingly disturbing over the campaign’s final weekend, with the prime minister saying that his defeat could lead to Israel’s annihilation. He has also suggested that tougher times could be ahead for Israel regardless of the outcome.

On Friday, he said that Israelis should prepare for the end of billions of dollars in American military support from the United States, given the sharp decline of Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion. He also said the possibility that Israel will face “banking sanctions” arising from international condemnation could force the country in coming years to rely on cryptocurrency to circumvent the penalties.

The remarks prompted a wave of criticism. Israel’s nonpartisan central bank, the Bank of Israel, issued a rare warning, saying that cryptocurrency would not save the economy in the event of international sanctions. And a former governor of the Bank of Israel, Jacob Frenkel, said that turning away from the global financial system would make Israel into “a leper.”

Opposition leaders accused Mr. Netanyahu of essentially accepting that Israel would become a pariah state.

“He’s lost it,” said Yair Lapid, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s centrist rivals. “Israel’s prime minister, in an election campaign, is saying three days before the elections to vote for him and he’ll ensure that Israel stays isolated.”

For weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has also been saying that Iran might attack Israel in an attempt to sabotage the elections — statements that some military analysts consider destabilizing. His messaging became even more dire over the weekend.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Netanyahu posted the image of an A.I.-generated cloud from a nuclear blast mushrooming over Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest metropolis. He attached a quote from a supporter to the effect that the scandals dogging him — he is currently facing trial on corruption charges, which he denies — were a distraction from “the real and tangible existential danger” that Iran posed.

Iran denies that it is pursuing a nuclear weapon but has also repeatedly threatened Israel, which is widely believed to have its own nuclear arsenal.

Hours later, Mr. Netanyahu gave one of the final interviews of his election campaign to Israel’s Channel 14, a network that largely echoes the prime minister’s talking points. He warned that his right-wing bloc was facing possible defeat.

“It’s not in our pocket and it’s not a lost cause,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

The prime minister warned that Israel was at risk of joining the ranks of countries like Belgium, Britain and France that, he said, have been “ruined” by an alliance between “the left and radical Islam.”

Rising to his feet, Mr. Netanyahu likened himself to a Jewish leader warning 1930s European Jewry of the impending Holocaust. Mr. Netanyahu said Mr. Eisenkot and his allies would not do what was necessary and vowed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and topple its government.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly boasted of having destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, only to speak of it as if it remains an imminent threat. “We cannot live side by side with this bomb,” he said. “Either they will either destroy us or we will destroy that poisonous cult.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents also believe the future of their country is hanging in the balance on Tuesday. Many liberal Israelis fear that this election is their last chance to prevent their country from becoming an authoritarian state, under the sway of the religious right and shunned on the world stage.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Eisenkot made his own final pitch to voters, calling for the country to come together “to save our Israel.” He vowed to order an inquiry into the government’s failure to prevent the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, uproot Hamas’s rule in Gaza within 18 months and force Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies, now exempted from military service, to share the burden of conscription.

“At stake in the elections is nothing less than the security of Israel and the survival of the Israeli story as we know it,” Mr. Eisenkot said.

David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.

Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Adam Rasgon is a reporter for The Times in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.

See more on: Benjamin Netanyahu"

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say - The New York Times

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Man detained at Georgia immigration detention center dies as hunger strike continues

Death inside Folkston facility comes as officials allegedly threaten hunger strikers there with force-feeding

José Olivares

Detainees behind concertina wire inside the Folkston ICE Processing Center and D Ray James Processing Center in Folkston, Georgia, on 9 September 2025. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

An immigrant detained at a sprawling detention center complex in Georgia died on Friday, local and federal officials confirmed, after the facility has already faced national scrutiny for its response to an ongoing hunger strike inside.

The death inside the D Ray James facility in Folkston, Georgia, comes as federal immigration officials and private contractors are allegedly threatening hunger strikers there with force-feeding, a detained hunger striker, his wife, attorneys and advocates all said this week. Detainees are refusing food to protest prolonged captivity and bad conditions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Saturday confirmed the death inside the facility, which is adjacent to the Folkston ICE processing center. Together, both facilities make up a large detention complex. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facilities under contract for the federal government, referred all questions to ICE.

The Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), a state law enforcement agency, confirmed in an email that the local sheriff’s office requested the GBI conduct an “in-custody death investigation” at the D Ray facility, the Guardian can reveal. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its umbrella agency, did not respond to requests for comment about the death or the hunger strike.

“This was a preventable tragedy,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Project South, a social justice organization based in Georgia. “We hold ICE and the private prison corporation fully responsible for any harm that migrants suffer at Folkston. We call for an immediate independent investigation into this tragic death and for accountability. Folkston must be shut down immediately.”

The man, Luis Sandoval, was 48 and from El Salvador, ICE said in its statement, adding that at about 1.46am on Friday, facility staff found Sandoval with a ligature around his neck. He was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

Sandoval was arrested by ICE officials earlier this month, and transferred to the Folkston facility on 8 October. In its press release, the agency said Sandoval had prior convictions for aggravated assault and other crimes, and that his death was under investigation.

It was unknown on Saturday whether Sandoval had participated in the hunger strike. The GBI said it could not share more details because of its active investigation.

Sandoval is the 60th person to die in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration, as ICE continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant crackdown.

Austin Kocher, president of Relevant Research, which studies the immigration enforcement system, and who is a research fellow at American University, said that this year, there have been an average of one death every 10 days in the custody of ICE. That figure includes people dying in detention centers or in nearby hospitals while still in the custody of ICE.

“Even in the past, there has not been such an overt dehumanization and overt view that migrants’ lives are expendable,” Kocher added. “I worry that that tone [from the Trump administration] has a tendency towards neglect and viewing migrants as disposable.”

Tens of thousands of people have been arrested and detained by ICE, leading to prolonged detention, as immigrants and asylum seekers fight their cases, and the agency has been stepping up its offensive in recent months despite a less showy presence on the streets.

One man currently in the Georgia detention center is Andrei Gerdiukov, a Russian asylum seeker who is participating in the hunger strike.

Nearly three weeks ago, Gerdiukov and dozens of others launched a hunger strike to demand their legal cases be processed more quickly through the US immigration system and to protest the conditions of their confinement. The hunger strikers were placed in solitary confinement, according to Gerdiukov and attorneys.

“I feel tired, I feel dizzy. Every move, it is hard,” Gerdiukov said in an interview by phone on Saturday from detention. “They threatened us that they were going to force-feed us.” He had heard about the death but did not know Sandoval.

Gerdiukov and his wife, Polina Chertushkina, came to the US from Russia to seek asylum after they faced persecution for their opposition to the war in Ukraine, Chertushkina said. Their cases are ongoing, but as the couple were driving through Florida this February, they were pulled over and detained by immigration officials. Chertushkina was released, but Gerdiukov was taken to Folkston eight months ago.

“I am so worried about him, I don’t know what to do,” Chertushkina said about the force-feeding threats, speaking on Saturday by phone. Chertushkina is asking lawmakers to assist her husband.

At least 12 hunger strikers are still participating, despite the threats of force-feeding, Gerdiukov said, adding that several had been fainting.

On Friday, the hunger strikers were moved to a nearby unit, where medical officials “wearing combat boots” took their vital signs, raising fears of imminent force-feeding, Gerdiukov said.

It was not clear on Saturday whether or when the authorities intended to use force-feeding.

The process to force-feed hunger strikers is secretive, with court records often sealed.

A judge has to approve the procedure, and then detention guards restrain a hunger striker while medical staff push tubing up the nose and down the throat to pump nutritional liquid into the stomach. Medical ethicists and human rights organizations have called the practice torture.

ICE generally says in court filings that force-feeding is necessary to maintain “good order” in detention centers as well as to keep detainees alive.

Kocher decried the contradictions.

“On the one hand, they’re trying to force-feed people [to keep them alive],” Kocher said. “And yet at the same time, in that same [Folkston] facility, you have someone who died and possibly was able to kill themselves.”

The Guardian has been tracking force-feeding cases nationwide. From January 2025 through August 2026, ICE sought court permission to force-feed at least 19 detained hunger strikers. One Afghan man was force-fed for nearly six months. A Kurdish man was force-fed for nearly eight months."

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Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization - The New York Times

Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization

The justice said during a discussion that recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign finance have deepened America’s divides.

Oct. 20, 2026

Justice Elena Kagan in Washington this summer. Justice Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, has issued strongly worded dissents in individual election-related cases.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for a series of election-related decisions in recent years that she said have led to more polarization and a dysfunctional democracy.

Justice Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, delivered the sharp critique two weeks before hotly contested midterm elections and in front of an ideologically mixed crowd of law students and professors. In a wide-ranging discussion, she pointed to the court’s rulings that have loosened restrictions on campaign funding, cleared the way for partisan voting maps and undermined landmark voting rights protections.

“In all these areas, the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works” and has created “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”

"The justice’s remarks came during a conversation at Catholic University’s law school with Prof. J. Joel Alicea, who was a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a conservative.

While Justice Kagan has issued strongly worded dissents in individual election-related cases, her remarks on Tuesday amounted to a global critique of how a series of choices by the court’s majority have affected democracy in the United States. Taken together, she said, the rulings have deepened political divisions and made the country’s electoral system work less well.

Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, for instance, when the court in 2019 closed the door on federal litigation challenging voting maps aimed at achieving political ends. As a result, she said, “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom” to draw voting maps that advantage either Democrats or Republicans in a way that “is very destructive of our democracy.”

Similarly, she said the court’s decisions to ease campaign finance rules have left loopholes that have allowed a massive infusion of political contributions into elections.

“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”

Justice Kagan spoke as the court’s new term has begun and ahead of midterm contests that will determine control of Congress, and could require the Supreme Court to intervene in post-election challenges. Election-related litigation has already been filed across the country, with both political parties anticipating the possibility of voter intimidation and the seizure of ballots.

In the coming months, the justices will also hear arguments in high-profile cases involving the legality of bans on semiautomatic rifles, religious rights and President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.

Even as the court has moved to the right with the addition of three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, Justice Kagan, a nominee of President Barack Obama, has at times found compromise with her colleagues selected by Republican presidents.

Before joining the bench in 2010, she was the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was known for building coalitions and recruiting conservative faculty members.

On Tuesday, Justice Kagan was the first justice who was nominated by a Democratic president and is a non-Catholic to take part in the annual event sponsored by the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. She is the fifth justice to participate.

She went over the allotted hour for the event and seemed eager to offer a polite takedown of originalism, the theory embraced by conservative justices that the Constitution should be interpreted based on its public meaning at the time it was adopted.

“They were writing the Constitution for the ages. They were writing the Constitution, knowing that there would be change in the world,” she said.

“The whole project” of originalism, she added, “is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”

Even as Justice Kagan faulted the conservative majority for not considering the consequences of its election-related rulings, she reiterated her defense of the conservative-dominated bench from a July appearance and said it was a “bum rap” to suggest the court had been too deferential to Mr. Trump.

In the court’s term that wrapped up in late June, the justices delivered long-sought conservative wins that expanded presidential power over immigration and the federal bureaucracy, in addition to dealing a blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights law.

But the court, including justices nominated by Mr. Trump, also rejected some of his marquee policies. The court struck down the president’s tariffs, blocked his order to end the guarantee of birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants and prevented him from immediately firing a leader of the Federal Reserve.

Recent polls have shown declining public opinion of the Supreme Court with a majority of Americans saying the justices are motivated mainly by politics rather than law, according to a September survey conducted by Marquette University Law School. Those unfavorable views come as Democratic officials and candidates are increasingly calling for structural changes to the court should the party win control of Congress.

Justice Kagan said the court she joined 16 years ago was more balanced and held in higher esteem by the public in part because it was less predictable. She pointed to the period after Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 when she said the justices had to compromise, listen and issue narrow rulings to try to avoid being deadlocked 4 to 4.

“There was a period of time where the court was in a better place and the country was in a better place because the court was more balanced and it was unclear whether the court could push through anybody’s program.”

“Nobody in America thought that the court was in the pocket of any one group or any one party,” she said, “and the court had a kind of legitimacy.”

Ann E. Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington."

Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization - The New York Times

Opinion | The Hunting of Ilhan Omar - The New York Times

The Hunting of Ilhan Omar

Oct. 21, 2026

Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

"You can understand the Trump administration as, in its essence, a cargo cult devoted to the illiberal tradition in American politics.

At every turn, it seeks to instantiate a society where, as the historian Steven Hahn writes, “rights-bearing may be defined or limited by specific rulers or be based on communities of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender” and where “civil and political standing tend to be marked by social and cultural exclusions.” To this end, it uses power “in its most naked and aggressive forms,” including outright violence.

What makes this a cargo cult is the extent to which the administration is preoccupied with summoning the image of a consolidated authoritarian state, versus taking the concrete steps needed to unravel liberal democracy as such. It is less concerned with passing laws than it is with projecting an image of dominance over civil society, whether or not there is a durable settlement. It does this through dramatic action whose central purpose is to menace, threaten and otherwise send a message.

The Department of Homeland Security’s recent raid on the Washington home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is a striking example of all of the above. The pretext of the raid is immigration enforcement. The White House asserts that Omar obtained her citizenship under false pretenses after she arrived to the United States from Somalia as a child, brought over by her father, who filed the required paperwork.

The specific charge is that Omar was listed as being 17 — and thus eligible for automatic citizenship through her father — when she was actually 18 and a legal adult who would have to obtain citizenship on her own. The raid was a fishing expedition — an attempt to build a case, any case, using materials seized from her home, including her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport. The goal appears to be to denaturalize Omar and then remove her from the country as an “illegal alien.” As the so-called border czar Tom Homan told Fox News on Saturday, “If you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before … and certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen.”

Both the charge and the case are obvious nonsense. There is no evidence that Omar lied or otherwise misled the federal government to obtain citizenship. The idea itself comes from the fetid swamps of the online far right — an expression of the anti-Somali bigotry that President Trump has elevated to the equivalent of state ideology. And in turn, the government’s hunt for evidence to wield against Omar is less about combating fraud and more about the president’s racist crusade against Somali Americans as well as his specific disdain for Omar, a vocal (and visible) political opponent of his administration.

It is because the investigation seems likely to fail on the merits — and appears to be nothing more than an attempt to intimidate a political opponent — that the spectacle carries the flavor of cargo cult activity. And yet, it still represents a shocking escalation of the president’s reactionary dominance politics, as well as an assault on a set of basic constitutional guarantees.

The White House seeks to punish Ilhan Omar for exercising her right to free speech. It seeks to curtail Representative Omar’s privileges and immunities under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause, which holds that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” both senators and representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place.” It also hopes to arrogate the Constitution’s declaration that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members” so that it can shape the composition of Congress itself.

One striking aspect of the second Trump administration worth noting is the extent to which the president keeps reinventing Stuart absolutism from first principles. Here, the president is all but re-enacting Charles I’s attempt to arrest his five most vocal opponents in the House of Commons in order to force the body into submission.

It should be said that the drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be “the people” of the United States.

“The United States has regularly revoked the citizenship of native-born and naturalized citizens alike,” the legal historian Amanda Frost observes in “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.” At its core, she continues, “citizenship stripping embodies the view that society can cast out its unwanted and use that process to redefine itself and all those allowed to remain.”

Over the course of our history, countless Black Americans, Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans — not to mention women married to foreign nationals — have been stripped of citizenship in this nation’s repeated efforts to define full political and legal status by race and nationality.

The effort to denaturalize Omar is reminiscent of the federal government’s pursuit of Emma Goldman, the Lithuanian-born anarchist and activist who was hounded out of the United States for her political views. One of millions of émigrés from the Russian Empire, Goldman escaped poverty and state-supported antisemitism as a teenager, reaching New York City in 1885. By the turn of the century, she was making her mark on American society as a powerful and magnetic proponent of human rights — of workers, of women, of immigrants — against hierarchies of all kinds.

In 1906, in the midst of mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Congress passed the Basic Naturalization Act, which gave the government the right to denaturalize American citizens. Denaturalization was permitted, writes Frost, “‘on the ground of fraud or on the ground that such certificate of citizenship was illegally procured’ — standards that could lead to denaturalization for minor errors in naturalization applications filed long in the past.” And the government, in Frost’s telling, focused its scrutiny on those immigrants who were a thorn in its side, like Goldman.

Goldman’s citizenship came through her former husband, Jacob Kershner, a fellow immigrant and naturalized citizen. But a handful of minor mistakes in his journey to citizenship were grounds to denaturalize him and, more important to federal officials, void Goldman’s claim to citizenship. She was arrested in 1917 for agitating against American involvement in the First World War, in violation of the Espionage Act. A young J. Edgar Hoover, then leading the government’s crusade against radicals, traveled to New York City to witness her deportation.

Most Americans who know this history look back at these episodes with shame and regret. Not so the Trump administration and its allies. For them these moments of authoritarian abuse — when the federal government used its power to target opponents, harass dissidents and hunt disfavored groups — are proof of concept.

The White House seems to think that if it goes through the motions of repression, it can get the same results. Hence the cargo cult quality of its actions here and in other arenas. Not only is there broad and deeply felt opposition to the administration’s attempts to persecute and ostracize its critics but there is little about the politics of the moment that favor the White House and its allies. The president, after all, is more unpopular than he has ever been.

If the Trump administration has one trick, it’s this: to abuse its power in increasingly draconian and autocratic ways, in the hope that it will establish the authoritarian dominance it tried to project. It is terribly destructive. It also doesn’t work. Looking at the growing odds of a Republican electoral catastrophe in November, I don’t think it will.

But if we can be certain of anything, it’s this: They won’t stop trying.

Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."

Opinion | The Hunting of Ilhan Omar - The New York Times

Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released From Russian Jail? - The New York Times

Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released by Russia?

Mr. Hubbard, a 74-year-old teacher, was held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

Oct. 21, 2026, 9:10 a.m. ET

A still from video released by the Moscow City Court Press Service showing Stephen Hubbard at a hearing in the Russian capital in 2024.Moscow City Court Press Service

Russia on Wednesday released a 74-year-old American teacher after holding him as a prisoner for more than four years. He had been convicted of working for Ukraine as a mercenary, charges that the United States said were fabricated.

The teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, was the only American in Russia considered “wrongfully detained” by the State Department and the only one to have been captured in Ukraine during the war and taken to Russia. His release came after President Trump, who has been easing American sanctions on Moscow, appealed directly to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Here’s how Mr. Hubbard became an unlikely pawn in an international conflict.

How did he end up in Ukraine?

Mr. Hubbard grew up in Big Rapids, a small Michigan city, with his mother and sister. As a young man, he enlisted in the Air Force and then the National Guard but did not stay long in either. His first marriage, at 20, fell apart, and his second marriage took him to Japan in the mid-1980s. There, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. He became sympathetic toward Russia.

After his second marriage ended, Mr. Hubbard moved to Cyprus, where a son from his first marriage lived and where he fell in love with a Ukrainian woman. The couple moved to Izium, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, where Mr. Hubbard taught English online.

Mr. Hubbard was a solitary man, family members said. He avoided email and social media, and he was suspicious of potential government surveillance. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Hubbard sent family members updates about his daily activities, which included searching for food and going to church. In text messages with a son of his who lives in Japan, he gave no indication that he had joined the Ukrainian military.

How was he captured?

Russian forces captured Mr. Hubbard, then 70, just weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

The circumstances of his arrest are murky, but the Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had been arrested at the home of an acquaintance and that he had been manning a military checkpoint. The Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had joined a regional territorial unit to defend Ukraine and that he received training, weapons, ammunition and $1,000 a month.

In October 2024, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Hubbard to six years and 10 months in a penal colony on charges of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine. Russian state news agencies reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charges.

Where was he held?

Mr. Hubbard was first held at a detention camp near the Russia-Ukraine border and later imprisoned in at least five different Russian detention centers. At times, his family had no idea where he was and the United States Embassy had no access to him. The New York Times pieced together accounts from fellow prisoners of war to trace where he had been held.

Unlike other Americans held in the Russian prison system, Mr. Hubbard, who spoke neither Ukrainian nor Russian, was kept in the general population, his lawyers said. Ukrainian prisoners of war who were held with Mr. Hubbard said that he had been repeatedly tortured because he was an American — beaten, forced to stand all day, given little food and poor medical care.

In May 2025, Mr. Hubbard was allowed to call his son in Cyprus, Joseph Coleman. In an interview, Mr. Coleman said that he had spoken for about a minute with his father, who initially sounded like he was in good spirits.

“But then somewhere in the middle it turned and you could you could hear the frustration in his voice,” Mr. Coleman recalled. “You could hear maybe a slight lack of hope.”

Mr. Coleman, who is a Greek Orthodox priest, wrote a long letter to Mr. Putin in September, emphasizing his Orthodox faith and pleading for his father’s release.

“My father is not a man of violence,” Mr. Coleman wrote. “He is a teacher and a peace-loving man, and above all he is my father.”

Why was he released?

Mr. Putin announced his decision to release Mr. Hubbard during a meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday.

Russia released Mr. Hubbard unilaterally, rather than in a prisoner swap — suggesting that for Mr. Putin, the American prisoner’s value had changed from a pawn in negotiations to a symbol of his renewed relationship with Mr. Trump.

In the days before Mr. Hubbard’s release, relations between the White House and Ukraine had frayed, with Mr. Trump moving to buy Russian diesel, lifting sanctions on Moscow and pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries.

Mr. Hubbard, who is in fragile health, will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment. His sister planned to travel to Texas to meet him. Mr. Coleman and another of Mr. Hubbard’s sons, the one who lives in Japan, also flew to the United States to be with their father.

Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.

Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe."

Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released From Russian Jail? - The New York Times

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