Fox News offered a blunt assessment of the Trump administration's approach to Russia on Wednesday, as longtime national security contributor Rebeccah Heinrichs said footage of President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a "humanitarian" was "insulting" to Americans (clip via X).

"It's insulting, I think, for Americans to hear something like that," Heinrichs said. "Of course, Russia, and in particular Putin, commits war crimes all the time. The fact that they snatched this innocent American who was minding his own business in Ukraine, snatched him and held him in a penal colony, clearly torturing him."

Her remarks came hours after the release of Stephen Hubbard earlier in the day. Hubbard, a retired U.S. teacher, had been imprisoned in Russia since 2022 after being detained in Eastern Ukraine, where he was accused of fighting as a mercenary.

Moscow has portrayed the release as a gesture of goodwill toward Trump, who took to social media to celebrate securing Hubbard's freedom with "no swap" in exchange — while overlooking that he had, just days earlier, handed Putin a major concession by dropping sanctions against Russia. Many experts have noted that Hubbard's torture is itself an embarrassment to envoy Steve Witkoff's praise of Putin.

As Heinrichs noted, "Every time Ukrainians do get any of their own people back from Russian captivity, there's evidence that they've been tortured. There's been Ukrainians tortured to death. So Putin is not a humanitarian."

In her estimation, Russia is working to advance two narratives. "One, that it is being reasonable," she explained. "That's why they're doing this hostage release at this point. And two, it's trying to convey that it is militarily dominant over Ukraine." That narrative, she argued, does not hold up.

"I just want to remind our viewers, remember: Ukraine reclaimed, liberated, more than 50 percent of Russian-occupied territory that Russia has taken over the last three years, and destroyed a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, and Ukraine doesn't even have a navy," Heinrichs said. "So Ukraine is militarily significant. It's a drone superpower, and its people are resilient, and they're not going to give in. So this is not a Zelensky issue here in terms of the terms that he's willing to take. The entire Ukrainian population is behind him on this."

The "Zelensky issue" refers to Trump's recent suggestions that the Ukrainian leader, rather than Putin, is standing in the way of peace. On Tuesday, after days of disparaging Zelensky, Trump claimed: "I think what's happening is that Russia would like to get it done. I think that, and you know, Russia is a big machine. They just keep grinding forward. And that's what they've done. They've taken a very large piece of land. And, you know, you can say that Ukraine is doing well or poorly, but the land gets bigger and bigger all the time, week by week. It's just they march forward. They just keep marching forward."

Fox News pushed back on that framing as well, posting: "The president insists Russia wants to reach a deal, even as he describes its military advancing week after week." The correction carried extra weight for where it aired: on Fox, the network most closely identified with Trump's own base, directly contradicting the president's account of the war rather than amplifying it.

Later on Tuesday, while discussing a proposal by Putin that he, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping hold a summit, ostensibly to discuss the war, Heinrichs warned the move would be a "serious mistake." "The Russians view the United States as its number one adversary, and they're trying to get the United States to back down and not support Zelensky," she said.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) voiced similar concern. "Putin is playing President Trump like a fiddle," he said. "And history is not going to look good on an America that failed to rise up and defend the Western world if Putin actually gets his way. And I believe that a summit with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, two countries who want to overwhelm the world, is absurd."

Whether Putin's summit proposal moves from offer to reality — and how the White House responds to objections from a Senate Republican and a Fox News contributor — now looms as the immediate question. Moscow, for its part, has its goodwill narrative in circulation; whether it holds up against the torture accounts and battlefield record Heinrichs cited is the debate now playing out in public.

This article is based on reporting originally published by Alternet.