news

NHL superstar Alexander Ovechkin appears in campaign ad for Putin’s United Russia party

Source: Meduza

Washington Capitals star Alexander Ovechkin appeared in a campaign video for United Russia ahead of elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, set for September 18–20. The party released a series of television videos featuring the top five candidates on its federal list: each of them stands surrounded by like-minded supporters and, as the Russian business daily Kommersant put it, “explains what ideals they stand for.”

Ovechkin appears alongside Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in that video. “Moscow is true to the centuries-old traditions of our state. When people deal with us honestly, we will always come to an agreement. When they lie to us and break their word, they will have only themselves to blame. And whoever comes at us with a sword should expect no mercy,” Lavrov says on camera, flanked in silence by Ovechkin, propagandist Margarita Simonyan, actor Vladimir Mashkov, singer Tatyana Kurtukova, and other government supporters.

Ovechkin captains the NHL’s Washington Capitals and holds the league’s all-time scoring record. He broke Wayne Gretzky’s record for goals in NHL regular-season games in 2025 and still holds it, with more than 900 career goals to his name.

Ovechkin has long backed Vladimir Putin. Ahead of the 2018 presidential election, he founded a public movement called Putin’s Team. “I personally am ready to be part of such a team,” Ovechkin wrote on Instagram at the time. But according to the Russian business daily Vedomosti, the idea for the movement, which brought together well-known athletes, did not originate with him. Instead, it came from the company IMA-Consulting, which works closely with the political bloc of Russia’s Presidential Administration. That bloc, headed by Sergey Kiriyenko, approved the plan.

Ovechkin also served as a trusted representative for Putin during the 2018 presidential campaign and later took part in the “Territory of Meanings” forum, organized by the Presidential Administration’s political bloc. He sat out United Russia’s 2021 State Duma campaign and the 2024 presidential election. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he called for peace without abandoning his support for Putin. “He’s my president. But I’m not a politician, I’m just an athlete. I really hope all this [the war] ends soon,” Ovechkin said.

The Presidential Administration’s political bloc weighed Ovechkin as a potential list leader for United Russia in 2026. According to the Russian business news outlet RBC, VTsIOM polled respondents on the hockey player’s potential in that role, alongside United Russia leader Dmitry Medvedev, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, and several military figures and “war correspondents.”

In the end, neither Ovechkin nor Medvedev made the federal top five, which instead consisted of Lavrov, Sobyanin, “war correspondent” Yevgeny Poddubny, children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova, and Vladislav Golovin, head of the patriotic “Yunarmiya” movement.

“His results were decent (based on VTsIOM’s research), better than Poddubny’s, and certainly better than Golovin’s and Lvova-Belova’s. But not good enough for anyone to ask him specifically or force him to do it. And he didn’t want to do it. He understood it would take a lot of time. [Unlike running in the election], appearing in a video is easy,” a source close to the Presidential Administration working on United Russia’s campaign told Meduza.