Since 2014, he lived in Izium (Kharkiv region of Ukraine). On 2 April 2022, he was detained by the Russian military. On 29 May, a video was published in which Hubbard says that after encountering the Russian military, he changed his attitude towards war, after which he retells some theses of Russian propaganda. Hubbard has been accused of mercenarism, although there is no evidence that he fought as part of the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukrainian military officer Igor Chichko, who was imprisoned with him in the Bryansk and Vladimir regions and was released in May 2024 as part of the exchange, said that the American was beaten, humiliated and starved. According to Chichko, Hubbard told him how he was tortured with electric shocks. (It is not known how Hubbard ended up in a colony in the Vladimir region before his sentencing.) On 7 October 2024, a court in Moscow sentenced the American to six years and ten months in a general regime colony.

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