Fox News calls out Trump admin for 'insulting' Americans

US President Donald Trump speaks with members of the press before walking to board Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC, US, October 10, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

On Wednesday, Fox News pulled no punches in its assessment of the Trump administration’s approach to Russia. According to longtime national security contributor Rebeccah Heinrichs, footage of President Donald Trump’s envoy calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian” is “insulting” to Americans.

“It's insulting, I think, for Americans to hear something like that,” said Heinrichs. “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.” This is in reference to the release of Stephen Hubbard earlier in the day, a retired U.S. teacher who has been imprisoned in Russia since 2022 after being detained in Eastern Ukraine, where he was accused of fighting as a mercenary. While Moscow has portrayed the release as a gesture of goodwill to Trump, who in turn took to social media to pat himself on the back for getting the release with “no swap” in exchange – ignoring the fact that he just days ago handed Putin a huge gift by dropping sanctions against Russia – many experts have noted that Hubbard’s torture is in itself an embarrassment to Witkoff’s praise of Putin. As Heinrichs notes, “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 Heinrich’s estimation, Russia is trying to push two narratives. “One, that it is being reasonable,” she explains. “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.” But this narrative doesn’t hold up. As Heinrich elaborates, “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. 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 is preventing peace rather than Putin. 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.” Here again, Fox News pushed back, posting, “The president insists Russia wants to reach a deal, even as he describes its military advancing week after week."

Later Tuesday, while discussing a proposal by Putin that he, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping hold a summit, ostensibly to discuss the war, Heinrich warned the move would be a “serious mistake,” saying, “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.” According to Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), “Putin is playing President Trump like a fiddle. 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."

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