From the Guardian’s Ukraine liveblog:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given an award to actor Steven Seagal for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree published on Monday showed.
Reuters reports the decree said the 70-year-old actor had been given Russia’s Order of Friendship. There was no immediate reaction from Seagal.
The decree mentioned Seagal’s work as a special representative of Russia’s foreign ministry for humanitarian ties with the United States and Japan.
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. Putin presented him with a Russian passport in Moscow in 2016.
