Saint Petersburg releases US citizen, Russian drones kill four people

US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg on October 21. The meeting, announced in the preceding hours, came after talks described as constructive between Witkoff himself and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo.

During the meeting, Putin announced the release of US citizen Stephen Hubbard from a Russian prison, in response to a request made by President Trump. This is the first concrete outcome made public from the Saint Petersburg talks, and it comes as the war on the ground continues unabated.

Overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, in fact, Ukrainian police reported that four people were killed in a series of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure in four regions of the country. Two of the victims were in the capital Kyiv, the other two near Kharkiv. On this point a clarification is necessary: news of the energy attacks currently comes from a single source (Ukrainian police, cited by international news agencies); no independent confirmation is currently available.

Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Sergii Koretskyi, added details on the extent of the damage, stating that Russia struck electrical facilities in the regions of Kyiv, Volyn, Odesa and Mykolaiv, as well as civilian enterprises in at least two other regions of the country. His words place this night’s attack within a broader trajectory beyond a single target, affecting both the capital and peripheral areas of the national electrical system.

The picture emerging from the day is therefore twofold. On one hand, a diplomatic channel producing a measurable result — the release of a prisoner — following a step, that of Oslo, described positively by both parties involved. On the other hand, a scale of violence that did not stop during the very hours when a possible path to peace was being discussed in Saint Petersburg, with direct strikes against Ukraine’s civilian energy grid in the middle of the cold season.

This is not the first time in recent days that the two dimensions — negotiation and military offensive — have overlapped without one visibly affecting the other. Hubbard’s release represents a specific gesture, tied to a particular request from the American counterpart; the attacks on energy infrastructure, however, fall within a line of action that Russia has been pursuing for some time against the Ukrainian electrical system, here confirmed by authorities in Kyiv on the basis of a single source.

No broader assessments of the damage to the electrical grid are currently available, nor are there indications on the duration of power outages in the affected areas. The death toll reported by Ukrainian police — four — remains the only verifiable figure on the night just passed.