Russia Freed a Former Marine Who Spent 47 Days in a Dissociative Stupor. Trump Says Moscow Asked for Nobody in Return.

Robert Gilman, a 32-year-old former U.S. Marine from Massachusetts, was released from Russian custody on Tuesday after more than four and a half years behind bars, and was flown out of the country on a State Department aircraft with his mother traveling alongside him. President Donald Trump announced the release on Truth Social, saying he had raised the case directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "We appreciate this decision, and the fact that Russia asked for no one in return -- No exchange took place," Trump wrote. A U.S. official said Putin approved a pardon.

Gilman was arrested in January 2022 in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow, after being removed from a train for causing a disturbance. Russian prosecutors said he was drunk and kicked a police officer. He was convicted and sentenced to three and a half years. His father disputed the official account in a 2024 op-ed in The Boston Globe, writing that his son had fallen ill and made accidental contact with the officer, who was not injured and presented no evidence of injury at trial.

The sentence did not stay at three and a half years. Russian authorities kept adding to it, citing incidents inside the prison system: assaulting an investigator, attacking a prison inspector, striking guards. By October 2024 his term stood at eight years and one month. By December of that year it had been extended again, to ten years. Gilman, a teacher before his arrest, was one of at least ten Americans known to be held in Russian custody.

His condition deteriorated badly this summer. Eric Lebson of the advocacy group Global Reach, which worked the case, said Gilman was moved to a psychiatric ward in late June and assessed as being in a "dissociative stupor" -- a state in which a person stops responding to their surroundings. He remained in it for 47 days, hooked to feeding tubes and, according to accounts relayed by advocates, handcuffed to the bed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated photographs of a gaunt Gilman wrapped in an American flag. The State Department had classified him as wrongfully detained.

Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who pushed for his release for years, described the treatment as "physical torture, forced medication, and provocations." U.S. officials emphasized that no prisoners were exchanged and no American concessions were made, characterizing the release as a goodwill gesture arranged through direct contact between the two presidents.

A U.S. official who spoke with Gilman after he was handed over offered a cautious read on his condition: "All things considered, he seems to be in good shape." He was to receive a medical evaluation in the air, and is expected to undergo rehabilitation at a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas -- the same city where Trevor Reed, another Marine veteran freed from Russian detention, was taken in 2022.