After the NHL star appeared in an ad campaign for United Russia, it\u2019s fair to start pressing about the impact of his stances \u2013 even if he doesn\u2019t want to talk about it<\/p>\n
When Russian launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, reporters asked Washington Capitals captain Alexander Ovechkin for his thoughts. It was no secret, even then, that Ovechkin was close to Vladimir Putin. Years before, Ovechkin boosted the Russian president in a social media campaign and featured Putin in his own Instagram profile photo. \u201cHe is my president,\u201d Ovechkin said of Putin<\/a> shortly after the invasion. \u201cBut [like] I said, I\u2019m not in politics, I\u2019m an athlete.\u201d That\u2019s over. He\u2019s in politics now.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing about the video: I\u2019m Russian,\u201d Ovechkin told reporters<\/a> Thursday. The video in question is one he taped for United Russia, a group supporting Putin, ahead of parliamentary elections. Ovechkin appears in the video alongside Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the state-controlled media outlet RT, and others. \u201cI\u2019m for peace and love, and I hope, in the world, it doesn\u2019t matter who you are,\u201d Ovechkin told reporters. \u201cI hope everybody understands everybody wants peace, and everybody hope everything\u2019s going to be OK in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After the NHL star appeared in an ad campaign for United Russia, it\u2019s fair to start pressing about the impact of his stances \u2013 even if he doesn\u2019t want to talk about it When Russian launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, reporters asked Washington Capitals captain Alexander Ovechkin for his thoughts. It was no … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}