President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced that 24 Filipinos who had been held in detention in Russia for nine months will be repatriated and reunited with their families, crediting Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government for helping resolve the case.
In a statement posted to his official Facebook page, Marcos said the Filipinos “will finally be on their way home” and thanked Putin and the Russian Federation “for their assistance and cooperation in bringing this matter to a positive resolution.” The President did not detail the circumstances of the group’s detention, the charges they faced, or when they are expected to arrive in the Philippines. As of posting, neither the Department of Foreign Affairs nor the Presidential Communications Office had released a separate statement confirming the figures or the timeline.
The announcement came during Marcos’s two-day working visit to Kazan, capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, where he co-chaired the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit as the Philippines holds the regional bloc’s rotating chairmanship. On June 17, Marcos and Putin held a bilateral meeting marking 50 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. The Presidential Communications Office said the talks focused on expanding cooperation in trade, energy, agriculture, and food security, with Marcos telling Putin that bilateral trade, though steady, had “a great deal more that we can do.” Marcos also invited Putin to attend the East Asia Summit, which Manila will host in November.
The trip was Marcos’s first visit to Russia, coming nearly 50 years after his father, the late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., visited the then-Soviet Union in 1976 — a trip that established diplomatic ties between Manila and Moscow.
The detention announcement, if confirmed, would mark a separate humanitarian outcome from the summit’s economic agenda. It is distinct from earlier cases reported this year in which the DFA confirmed several Filipinos were being held as prisoners of war in Ukraine after allegedly being recruited to fight for Russian forces — situations the department has said remain governed by the parties to that conflict.
