Action star turned Putin pal Steven Seagal delivered a painful speech at the Kremlin on Thursday as he was presented with an award for his dubious accomplishments as the Kremlin’s special diplomatic representative to the U.S.
Staring down at a prepared text, the Under Siege star dispassionately urged those in attendance to “come together and fight for truth and justice” against Nazi propaganda after the Russian president awarded him the Order of Friendship for his “great contribution” to international cultural cooperation.
Reciting a list of the Kremlin’s fantastical claims about Ukraine about as convincingly as if he were reading the ingredients on the back of a cereal box, Seagal wondered aloud why the world would not wake up to Ukraine’s supposed history of “human trafficking, organ trafficking, narco trafficking, child sex trafficking”—just about all the traffickings—“bio-chemical warfare labs, fascism, and nazism.”
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“And these are the things that we still tried to make them our brothers,” he said clumsily in English. “This war that we are currently embroiled in was started and financed by the West, and has come to involve the entire world in the fight against good and evil.”
Seagal, 72, was personally given a Russian passport by Vladimir Putin in 2016 and in 2018 was appointed a special envoy to “facilitate relations between Russia and the United States in the humanitarian field, including cooperation in culture, arts, public and youth exchanges.” It’s unclear what he has accomplished in that role, if anything, as he seems to serve more as a personal cheerleader for the Russian president.
At Putin’s swearing-in ceremony for his fifth term earlier this month, Seagal told reporters, “He’s the greatest world leader, he’s the greatest.”
