Actor Steven Seagal visits site in Donbas where dozens of Ukrainian POWs died in attack

Steven Seagal, the American actor perhaps best known for stabbing Tommy Lee Jones in the head in the 1992 film “Under Siege,” is reportedly filming a documentary film about the “war in the Donbas,” according to Denis Pushilin, the head of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.

On Tuesday, Russian pundit Vladimir Solovyov shared images from Seagal’s recent visit to occupied eastern Ukraine, where the actor observed the wreckage of a detainment center in Olenivka and supposedly inspected the “fragments of American missiles, confirming Kyiv’s involvement in the massacre of its own soldiers,” said Solovyov.

On July 29, an explosion at this site killed roughly 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war. Russia has accused Ukraine of firing U.S.-provided rocket launchers at the barracks, but Kyiv insists that the Russian military staged an artillery strike to cover up “traces of torture and execution.”

Seagal was granted Russian citizenship in 2016. Two years later, Russia’s Foreign Ministry named him a “special representative for Russian-American humanitarian relations.” In 2021, Seagal joined the nominally opposition political party Just Russia for Truth.