Beyond Bernie Ecclestone: the strange friends you make when you are Vladimir Putin

Bernie Ecclestone, the godfather of Formula One and subject of one of the funniest Alan Partridge bits, has long been an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Still, his rhetoric on UK morning show Good Morning Britain yesterday took things up a notch.

“What he’s doing is something that he believed was the right thing he was doing for Russia,” said the former head of F1. “Unfortunately, he’s like a lot of business people, certainly like me, we make mistakes from time to time. I’d still take a bullet for him. I’d rather it didn’t hurt, but if it does I’d still take a bullet, because he’s a first-class person.”

Of course, Putin, in his push for legitimacy (and presumably the vanity of any dictator), has made some odd friends over the years. There’s a distinctly modern flavour to the leathery older gents making friends with Putin. Sure, there were plenty of high society sorts on both sides of the Atlantic happy to defend Hitler in the 1930s, but there simply wasn’t a category of celebrity equivalent to “faded action star”.

Steven Seagal

Worst Saturday Night Live host in history, serial sexual harassment claim recipient and high-kicking early ’90s “actor” Steven Seagal has long been a vocal supporter of Putin. Seagal was granted Russian citizenship in late 2016, after, according to government spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “asking quite insistently and over a lengthy period to be granted citizenship”. Seagal has taken the party line on the Ukrainian conflict, saying he looks at the countries “as one family” only quarrelling because of some unspecified outside influence.

Gerard Depardieu

Longtime French actor and frequent rape-accusation denier Gerard Depardieu has been friendly with Putin since 2013, when he was made a Russian citizen to dodge French taxes. “I love your president, Vladimir Putin, very much and it’s mutual,” he said at the time.

After the Ukrainian invasion, Depardieu was mildly critical, but there’s something suggestive in his use of “fratricidal”, again in keeping with the notion of Ukraine and Russia as siblings having a disagreement: “I am against this fratricidal war. I say ‘stop the weapons and negotiate’.”

Oliver Stone

In the years since he first became known as the filmmaker most likely to get an award for using 18 different film stocks per scene over three incomprehensible hours, Oliver Stone has primarily been the kind of leftist who gives high school level analysis about how Stalin and Hitler are given too hard a time in the Western press.

And while he’s been critical of the invasion of Ukraine (which, like many of Putin’s defenders on the anti-US imperialism left, he was convinced was never going to happen), he also has given his social media followers a reading list to cut through the “hysteria of Western media, screaming bloody murder at Putin, omitting key facts when inconvenient”. And no, I’m afraid he’s not going to be the first person on this list to have a Wikipedia page free from the heading “sexual harassment allegations“.

Of course, it’s not just the mixture of self-interest and vanity of fading celebrities that gets Putin face time with celebs. Back in 2010 Putin met with Leonardo DiCaprio (they were saving big cats, you see) and gave a rendition of “Blueberry Hill” at a children’s charity benefit in front of Sharon Stone, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci and, of course, Gerard Depardieu among others.

Apparently the group hadn’t know Putin would be there, but his history (Russian journalists were showing up dead with alarming regularity, and Russia’s forays into Georgia and Chechnya weren’t that long ago) wasn’t enough to stop them clapping along and laughing.