NHL star Alex Ovechkin appears in campaign ad for pro-Putin United Russia party

Alex Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading goalscorer, has appeared in a campaign ad for the United Russia party, which supports Vladimir Putin, as he prepares for the new hockey season.

The Russian business newspaper Vedomosti published images of the Washington Capitals star alongside pro-Putin figures such as Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, the leading parliamentary candidate on United Russia’s list, and Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the propaganda network RT.

Ovechkin is a long-time supporter of Putin. In 2017, he launched Putin Team, a social movement that he hoped would unite “people who are proud of their country and want to make Russia stronger.” He also praised the Russian leader’s “trust in and respect for his people, his fairness [and] righteousness, and the fact that he really cares.”

The 40-year-old was more cautious about his backing of Putin after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He said he hoped the war “was going to be over and we are going to be living in a good world”, although he still said that Putin was “my president”. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the war that followed Putin’s invasion.

Ovechkin signed a one-year contract extension with the Capitals in July. The Capitals picked him with the first overall pick in the 2004 NHL draft and he has played his entire NHL career with them, winning the Stanley Cup as the team’s 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 one that few believed would ever be broken.