SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The younger sister of Stephen Hubbard, the U.S. citizen freed Wednesday after spending more than four years in a Russian prison, said her brother didn’t realize he was being released until he was put aboard a plane and saw the American flag.

“He didn’t know why he was being taken from the prison to Moscow, and he may have thought he was going to his death,” Patricia Hubbard Fox said during an interview Thursday in San Antonio, where her brother was taken for evaluation.

“He’s been kind of laughing a lot,” she added. “Like relief laughing. ‘Oh my God, you know, I’m free. This is really happening.’”

President Donald Trump said he had asked Russian President Vladimir Putin during a phone call earlier this month to free Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired teacher from Michigan. Hubbard was accused of fighting alongside Kyiv’s forces after Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. In 2024, he was sentenced in closed court proceedings to nearly seven years in prison.

The U.S.…