They gathered on Sunday for the 70th birthday of Steven Seagal, the American-born actor best known for his role as bitten cops and commandos in action movies. “Each of you, you are my family and my friends. “And I love you all,” Seagal said, wearing his signature large black shirt. “We stand together, from the thick and the thin,” he added. At the table next to Seagal sat some of the top supporters of the Russian Kremlin, including the editor-in-chief of the state-controlled RT news network, Margarita Simonyan, and Vladimir Soloviev, one of the country’s most notorious Seagal propagandists. . speaking in russian. The actor, who calls himself a Buddhist, has long had a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was granted Russian citizenship in 2016. He had previously described Putin’s annexation of Crimea as “very reasonable” and described the president as “one of the world’s greatest living leaders”. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has doubled his support for Putin, saying in a recent interview that an “external entity” was to blame for pitting the two countries against each other. The Kremlin and state-controlled media have for decades cultivated Putin’s friendship with Western celebrities such as Seagal, in what many saw as an attempt to boost his image at home and abroad. “The main goal of all this was to prove that the country’s model of society is attractive to foreigners,” said Mark Galeotti, author of We Need to Talk About Putin and a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. However, the number of Western stars and politicians who, like Seagal, are still eager to get along with Putin, has plummeted in recent months, with many seeking to distance themselves from a country accused of waging war. . crimes during the invasion. One of Putin’s first friends to condemn Russia’s actions was French superstar Gerard Depardieu, who denounced “the crazy, unacceptable excesses of their leaders like Vladimir Putin” in Ukraine. Depardieu, who has won worldwide acclaim for his roles in films such as The Last Metro and Jean de Florette, became a Russian citizen in 2013 after criticizing the French government for its tax policies. In a letter to Russian state television at the time, Depardieu exclaimed, “I love your president, Vladimir Putin, very much and it is mutual.” Putin personally awarded Russian citizenship to Depardieu that year at a special dinner where the two were pictured embracing. However, speaking to Agence France-Presse in March, Depardieu, who is currently facing charges of rape in France, called on Russia to “lay down its arms and negotiate.” Depardieu’s comments were met with outrage in Russia, with Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peshkov saying the actor “did not fully understand” the situation in Ukraine. Some Russian officials have called on Putin to revoke Depardieu’s Russian citizenship. Criticism of Russia’s actions has only grown since news of the bodies of plainclothes men on the streets of Bucha outside Kyiv, a testament to the full scale of atrocities believed to have been committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. On Saturday, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi admitted that he was “deeply disappointed and saddened” by the behavior of the Russian leader. Berlusconi, believed to be a fan of Putin’s macho style of governing, famously visited a Crimean vineyard with the Russian leader shortly after Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014. The billionaire now said Russia was responsible for “the horror of the massacre of civilians in Bhutan and elsewhere, for real war crimes.” Putin has also been criticized by the so-called Western replacement camp – journalists and celebrities who have previously expressed support for Russia in their mutual criticism of “American imperialism.” Shortly after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, veteran US director Oliver Stone, who defended Russia’s actions in Crimea in his documentaries and conducted a series of interviews with the Russian leader in 2017, wrote on Twitter that Putin’s “aggression” in Ukraine was “wrong”. “Although the United States has many aggressive wars in its conscience, it does not justify Mr Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Twelve mistakes are not right. “Russia made a mistake in invading.” While Galeotti argued that Putin probably “never trusted foreign friends” from the beginning, he said that the latest criticism from once pro-Kremlin figures finally shows the growing isolation in which Russia has found itself. “When the only real friends of an aspiring big power seem to be Syria, Venezuela and Nicaragua, you have to ask what went wrong.”
