Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday presented his country’s highest award, the Order of Friendship, to 70-year-old former action star Steven Seagal for “international humanitarian and cultural work.”
The Order of Friendship, established by Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1994, is technically Russia’s highest award for non-citizens. In 2006, for example, Russia presented the award to U.S. Navy and Air Force officers for assisting with the rescue of a Russian submarine crew.
President Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was controversially awarded the Order of Friendship in 2013 for helping to create a partnership for oil drilling in the Arctic and Black Seas. The partnership was splintered a year later by Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Seagal is a Russian citizen, having personally received his papers from Putin in 2016.
“I want to congratulate you and express the hope that this is another, albeit small, gesture and it might be a sign of the gradual normalization of relations between our countries,” Putin said when presenting Seagal with his citizenship documents.
Shortly after he became a Russian citizen, Seagal was classified as a security threat by the Ukrainian government and banned from visiting Ukraine for five years.
Seagal has been a friend and admirer of Putin for many years. He outspokenly supported Putin’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine and supported Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine one year ago.
Seagal was named as a “special humanitarian envoy” to the United States and Japan for the Russian Foreign Ministry in 2018. Seagal was born in Michigan and lived in Japan for a time, working as a martial arts instructor before making his big break in Hollywood as first a stunt coordinator and then actor.
In 2021, he officially joined a pro-Putin political party called “A Just Russia – Patriots – For Truth” (the awkward name was formed when three smaller parties merged together).
According to Russian media reports, Seagal is not eligible to run for office under the party banner unless he renounces his American citizenship. Whether he would do so remains to be seen, but last July he vowed that he would never renounce his Russian citizenship under any circumstances.
Seagal hailed Putin as “one of the greatest world leaders and one of the greatest presidents in the world” in a 2022 birthday message to the authoritarian Russian ruler.
“I am really hoping and praying that he gets the support and the love and the respect that he needs, and that all the tribulations that are going on now will be over soon, and we will be living in a world of peace,” Seagal said of Putin in the birthday message.
In August 2022, Russian state media covered Seagal paying a visit to the Olenivka prison in Ukraine, a captured facility Russia was using to house Ukrainian prisoners of war. A few weeks before Seagal’s visit, an explosion killed 53 people at the prison. The Ukrainian military said the explosion was caused by a Russian bomb detonated from the inside.
Seagal wholeheartedly supported Russia’s assertion that Ukraine bombed the facility with a U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket system (HIMARS).
“It definitely looks like a rocket. If you look at the burning and other details, of course it’s not a bomb. Not to mention the fact that Russia really has a lot of artifacts from HIMARS,” Seagal said in the video, which was ostensibly part of a documentary he was making about the war.
In October 2022, the Russian government canceled plans to build a pediatric cancer facility near Moscow and gave the parcel of expensive property it would have occupied to the Gorki Holding Company, which is 26-percent owned by Seagal. No competitive bids were entertained for the land grant.
Seagal’s company announced that it would build an “International Center for Martial Arts” on the 20 acres of exclusive property, which is valued at $13.6 million. Putin, like Seagal, is a martial arts enthusiast.
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