The Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this Tuesday that Robert Gilman, a former U.S. Marine who had been detained in Russia for over four years, was on his way home to reunite with his family and receive medical care in the United States.
In a message posted on his official account, Rubio thanked Russia for cooperating with the special envoy Steve Witkoff to achieve the release and allow Gilman to receive treatment on U.S. territory.
Gilman was arrested in January 2022 in Voronezh, accused of assaulting a Russian police officer while he was ill and in transit to the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where he was heading to replace a damaged passport before traveling to Moldova for work.
A Russian court sentenced him in October of that year to four and a half years in prison in a penal colony. Subsequently, his sentence was extended to ten years following new accusations of assault against prison staff, a prison inspector, and other state officials.
In the months leading up to his release, Gilman's health had severely deteriorated. Since June 2026, he had been in a state of dissociative stupor, was being fed through a tube, and could not communicate or attend court hearings.
In July, he was moved from a penitentiary hospital to a civil psychiatric ward, and in early August, his sister and advocacy groups warned that he could be near death. Gilman's mother was prevented from visiting him in the hospital despite having a court order.
U.S. authorities confirmed that the release was not a prisoner exchange: Russia demanded nothing in return and released her invoking humanitarian reasons.
The negotiations were led by Witkoff, who has become the primary diplomatic channel between the Trump administration and Moscow, and who had already negotiated the release of Professor Marc Fogel in February 2025.
Rubio noted that Gilman "joins more than 100 Americans that President Trump has freed during his second term," a figure that the White House had already reported in March 2026 when accounting for cases in Russia, Iran, and other countries.
At the same time, the Secretary of State warned that the task is not yet complete. “While we appreciate this positive step, we continue to seek the immediate return of all other Americans who are unjustly detained,” he wrote, explicitly mentioning Stephen Hubbard, an English teacher captured by Russian forces in Ukraine in April 2022 and sentenced to nearly seven years on mercenary charges that Washington considers baseless.
The State Department classifies Hubbard as unjustly detained, and his family along with Ukrainian officials maintain that he was a civilian, not a combatant.
According to information from Al Jazeera about Gilman's release, Hubbard remains the only American officially classified by Washington as wrongfully detained in Russia.
"The president will not stop until all unjustly detained Americans are home," Rubio concluded.
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