“He’s one of the greatest leaders in the world”: Steven Seagal, the former Hollywood star is an unconditional fan. The star of American action cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has a hero: Vladimir Putin and his fights, including in Ukraine. This Monday the master of the Kremlin presented him with the “Order of Friendship”. A thank you for “his great contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation”, according to the official legal website of the Russian government.
Age brings them together: they were both born in 1952. And we know how much the Russian president likes to show off his virile muscles on horseback or fishing. He prides himself on his performance on the tatami. So, he doubtless feels admiration for this American who was the first foreigner in charge of a dojo in Japan and for the action films he interpreted or directed. “Trap on the High Seas” directed by Andrew Davis, released in 1992, propelled him among the leading actors.
As his career declined, the native of Lansing, Michigan, gradually grew closer to authoritarian leaders, including the head of the Kremlin but also Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, to whom he had presented a samurai sword in 2021.
In 2016, he received a Russian passport from Vladimir Putin, while retaining his American citizenship. The Russian president then said he hoped to see it as a sign of the “normalization” of relations between Moscow and Washington. Both praised “a totally depoliticized act”. He had, however, been a regular traveler to Moscow and championed Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014.
Installed since in Russia, he even joined in 2021 a nationalist party. Last August, he traveled to eastern Ukraine to meet with the leader of the pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, and offer his support. He then visited the prison of Olenivka, near Donetsk, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners died in an explosion this summer.
For Vladimir Putin’s 70th birthday in October, Steven Seagal also recorded a video of support for the Russian president. “I really hope and pray that he gets the support, love and respect he needs. And that all the current tribulations will end soon, that we will live in a world at peace, ”added the actor.