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. government under the Biden administration had designated Hubbard as wrongfully detained, and his legal team also disputed the Russian allegation, saying he was not involved in any military activity.

Hubbard Fox said her brother was starved and beaten so severely in prison that some of his fellow inmates from Ukraine had to carry him.

“The only English they knew was ‘Die, American. Die,’” she said of the Russian guards. “And that just made him mad enough to not die, you know? ‘I’ll show them.’ I’m so proud of him.”

Stephen Hubbard, a U.S. citizen accused of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine against Russia shows up in a video link as he stands in a glass cage during a court session in the Moscow City court in Moscow, Russia, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024.

AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File

Hubbard, a U.S. Air Force veteran, taught English overseas and retired in 2012 to Cyprus, where one of his sons is an Orthodox Christian priest. He later moved to Ukraine to be with a woman he had met, his lawyers said, and remained in the country after the relationship ended. He was living there at the time of Russia’s invasion.

Hubbard Fox said she didn’t know where her brother was until a woman in Ukraine tracked her down after seeing a prison roster with his name on it.

“God doesn’t answer prayers immediately sometimes, but he always answers my prayer,” Hubbard Fox said. “And I said, ‘Jesus, get him home.’”

She said in a separate interview Wednesday that her brother would probably come live with her in Colorado, and they both were looking forward to a family reunion.

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Peipert reported from Denver.