Alex Ovechkin, the National Hockey League’s all-time leading goal scorer, has appeared in a campaign video for United Russia, the political party that supports Vladimir Putin, ahead of the upcoming hockey season.
The Russian business newspaper Vedomosti published images from the advertisement showing the Washington Capitals star alongside prominent supporters of Putin, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the top candidate on United Russia’s electoral list, and Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the RT network.
Ovechkin has long voiced support for Putin. In 2017, he launched Putin Team, a social movement intended to bring together “people who are proud of their country and want to make Russia stronger.” He has also praised Putin’s “trust in and respect for his people, his fairness [and] righteousness, and the fact that he really cares.”
After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin adopted a more guarded public position. He said he hoped the war “was going to be over and we are going to be living in a good world,” while still describing Putin as “my president.” Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the war that followed the invasion.
Ovechkin signed a one-year contract extension with the Capitals in July. Selected first overall by Washington in the 2004 NHL draft, he has played his entire NHL career with the franchise and won the Stanley Cup as captain in 2018. In 2025, he scored his 895th goal, passing Wayne Gretzky’s all-time scoring record, a mark that had stood since 1999 and was once widely viewed as unbreakable.
