The US-born actor and martial arts practitioner has worked in Japan and has long admired Putin, from whom he received a Russian passport in 2016.
Seagal, a frequent visitor to Russia, backed Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 as “very reasonable”, joined a pro-Kremlin party in 2021, and visited a Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine last summer, where he met with a Russian-backed separatist leader.
Ukraine in 2017 banned Seagal from entering for five years on national security grounds.
