Steven Seagal’s got a bit of a love affair going on with autocrats and doing strange things on camera during mutual butt-kissing sessions. John Oliver recently revisited the time that the Under Siege star ate carrots with “the last and only dictator in Europe.” And the worst SNL host of all time has been enamored with Russian President Vladimir Putin for quite some time. As seen above, the pair aired their bromance to the press (in 2013) during the opening of a Moscow martial-arts school that helps to train KGB agents.
Here’s where it gets stranger. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Seagal was said to have pulled out of his “special envoy” role (tied to humanitarian causes since 2018) that he enjoyed with Russia. All of that talk must have gone nowhere, though, and it’s worth noting that Joe Rogan recently passed on a fake story about Seagal fighting alongside Putin’s troops against Ukraine.
As it turns out, the spirit of that story that might be spot on because Seagal apparently popped onto the site of a destroyed prison in war-torn Ukraine. In July, the facility (Donetsk’s Olenivka prison) was bombed, killing 50 of Russia’s prisoners of war, and the Military Times reports on footage aired by Russian websites, which detail the propaganda spread by Seagal while attempting to convince everyone that Ukrainians did the bombing here. There’s some heavy tin-foil hat flavor going on:
Seagal added a conspiracy angle by suggesting that HIMARS was used by Ukrainian troops because the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to silence a “Nazi” being held at the prison.
“The interesting thing is that one of the killed Nazis is a Nazi who just started talking a lot about Zelensky,” Seagal added, “and that Zelensky is responsible for the orders about torture and other atrocities that violate not only the Geneva War Convention, but are also crimes against humanity.”
Business Insider notes that the footage (which has been popping up on YouTube) hasn’t yet been authenticated, but it’s been aired by Russian state media and contains Putin-endorsed talking points. Seagal’s aiming to convince everyone that it’s really Ukraine who committed this war-crime atrocity, and a Russian TV host, Vladimir Solovyov, has attempted to put it on public record that Seagal has “personally examined” rocket fragments during the (convenient) course of making a documentary.
Even though Seagal purportedly has access, though, the New York Times reports that the International Red Cross Committee still hasn’t been permitted to visit the site since the fatal July attack. [Big sigh]
(Via Military Times, Business Insider, Newsweek, & New York Times)