In the U.S., Steven Seagal’s star has been on the wane in recent years. As Vox tells us, the Aikido master-slash-actor has been in hot water for his Me Too accusations, and as your eyes will doubtlessly tell you, it’s been a looooong time since he made a decent movie. Fortunately for Mr. Seagal and bafflingly for the rest of us, he has been doing significantly better on the Russian front. Seagal has been rubbing shoulders with one Vladimir Putin for a while now, and as Business Insider reports, strange stories about him on goodwill trips, slapping himself like madman in an attempt to participate in a traditional Chechen dance, started to emerge around 2013. According to the Spectator, that same year Putin requested that President Barack Obama’s government would make Seagal “an honorary consul of Russia in California and Arizona, with a view to being a key intermediary between Moscow and Washington.” This request was promptly denied after a double take and a “You’ve got to be kidding us” moment, but as the BBC reports, Putin wasn’t done with the hulking action star. On the contrary: Seagal was given a Russian citizenship in 2016, and in 2018, the actor was appointed the “special envoy to improve Russia’s ties with the United States.” 

The whole thing begs a number of questions — or rather, just three, which are “What?” “How?” and “Why?” screamed at a rising pitch and at random intervals. Is this just one of those strange situations like the whole thing between Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-Un, or could there be something more nefarious at play? 

Steven Seagal is an important ambassador of “low-brow culture”

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