American actor Steven Seagal has a new role to play: goodwill ambassador to the United States, deputized for the task by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
“Steven Seagal was appointed as the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special representative for Russian-US humanitarian ties,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s team said in a bulletin carried Saturday by state-run media. “As for international practice, you can draw a parallel with the functions of United Nations Goodwill Ambassadors.”
Seagal was born in Michigan, but received Russian citizenship and a passport directly from President Vladimir Putin in 2016. The pair reportedly were introduced to each other by a Hollywood producer who ferries actors from the U.S. to Russia, where the 1990s action star remains popular, and their relationship benefited from Seagal’s opposition to former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, particularly what he regarded as the “idiotic” response to the Ukraine crisis in 2014.
“I have Republican views and policies of President Obama does not appeal to me. In many ways it is not even his fault, but the people who are in his inner circle who have views on world politics are diametrically opposed to Russia,” Seagal said at the time, per USA Today. “In my opinion, a situation where the U.S. and Russia are on opposite sides of the fence is abnormal. And I see my task is to do everything to facilitate the normalization of relations. All will benefit from this.”
U.S.-Russia relations cratered after Russia annexed Ukraine from Crimea and sent additional forces to support a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, at a time of political crisis for the former Soviet satellite state. The U.S. and other Western powers responded to “the first gunpoint land grab in Europe since the end of World War II” by expelling Russia from a bloc of leading industrialized democracies and imposing sanctions on Putin’s government. Trump’s administration has retained the sanctions, which were codified into federal law in 2017.
“I would like to congratulate you, and I also hope that this small step will mark the beginning of the gradual improvement in our interstate relations,” Putin told Seagal at the citizenship ceremony in 2016.
The actor will work in a volunteer capacity on people-to-people ties between the former Cold War adversaries. “The task is to facilitate relations between Russia and the United States in the humanitarian field, including cooperation in culture, arts, public and youth exchanges, and so on,” the Foreign Ministry said Saturday. “It is the case when people’s diplomacy meets halfway traditional diplomacy.”
He did not have to give up his U.S. citizenship in order to obtain Russian citizenship. “Russia is quite beautiful,” Seagal tweeted in 2016. “But I will always love my country. USA is my home.”
