September 2026 — not 2014, not 2022

“I’m Russianand I supportmy country.”

Alex Ovechkin, Washington Capitals captain, explaining why he filmed a campaign ad for Vladimir Putin’s ruling party. Asked if he hesitated, he said: “No.”

Here is what his country does.

30 seconds

This is happening right now, and he chose it.

He filmed a campaign ad for Putin’s party.

Days before Russia’s September 2026 Duma elections, Ovechkin appeared in a United Russia campaign spot for Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — sanctioned by the US, UK, EU and Canada, and named by the US Treasury as an architect of the invasion — alongside RT propaganda chief Margarita Simonyan.

He was asked if he hesitated. He said no.

“Well, they asked me to do that. I say yes. So, it’s simple as that.” Then: “I’m Russian and I support my country.” Then, in the same breath, that he hopes for “peace and love.” Both things cannot be true.

A NATO country banned him for life. His team called him a pillar.

On September 18, Latvia declared him persona non grata and barred him from the country indefinitely. The Washington Capitals released a statement describing him as “a pillar of the community” and said the focus is “on the season ahead.”

Let’s be precise about what this is — and what it isn’t.

Nobody is asking Alex Ovechkin to stop being Russian. You cannot take Russia out of a Russian, and no one should try. Russian language, Russian family, Russian childhood, Russian pride — none of that is the problem, and treating it as one is both wrong and stupid.

Appearing in a campaign advertisement for the ruling party is not culture. It is a political act, performed on camera, for an election, in 2026 — while that party’s government is deporting children and dropping grenades on pedestrians.

United Russia is Vladimir Putin’s party. It votes for the war. It funds the war. It legislates the erasure of Ukraine. To campaign for it is to endorse everything it does. That is not an inference. That is what a campaign ad is for.

Unedited · Capitals media day · September 17, 2026

Read it in full. Nothing is taken out of context.

“About the video, I’m Russian. As soon as I’m done playing hockey, I’m probably going to, not probably, I’m going to stay there. I’m going to live there. My kids going to live there, my family. I’m for peace and love. I hope everything’s going to be okay. My home is Russia and DC is my second home.”
Asked what the invitation looked like, and what would have happened had he refused:
“Well they asked me to do that. I [said] yes. It’s as simple as that.”
Asked whether he hesitated:
“No.”
Asked why he agreed:
“Well, [as] I said, I’m Russian and I support my country. [As] I said I’m for peace and love and I hope in the world it doesn’t matter who you are. I hope everybody understands. Everybody wants peace and everybody hopes everything’s going to be okay.”

He was handed four separate chances to say one sentence — I don’t support the war — by four different reporters. He used all four to say the opposite, and finished each one with “peace and love.”

Bucha✕
Mariupol✕
Izium✕
Kramatorsk✕
Olenivka✕
Kherson✕
Borodianka✕
Irpin✕
Chernihiv✕
Vinnytsia✕
Dnipro✕
Okhmatdyt✕

The direct link

He campaigns for the party.
The party does this.

Six things Russia has done to Ukraine — all of them documented by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, or Ukraine’s own prosecutors. Every one of them was carried out by the government whose ruling party Alex Ovechkin agreed, on camera, to campaign for.

Exhumation site in Bucha, Ukraine, with numbered forensic markers beside body bags recovered from a mass grave. (National Police of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0)

01 — Bucha

They raped women and girls, then executed them in the street.

365verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence

When Russian forces withdrew from Bucha they left 276 civilian bodies behind — shot in the back of the head, hands bound, dumped in mass graves. Investigators found a group of women and girls aged 14 to 24 who had been locked in a basement and raped for days. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General has since verified 365 cases of conflict-related sexual violence, with survivors aged 4 to 80. UN monitors estimate that for every case reported, 10 to 20 are never spoken aloud.

UN investigators called rape by Russian forces a deliberate tactic, not a lapse in discipline.

Source: UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine

A Ukrainian family with young children being escorted out of a frontline village in Kharkiv Oblast by police. (National Police of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0)

02 — Stolen children

They took the children and taught them to be Russian.

20,610Ukrainian children verified as deported or forcibly transferred

Ukraine has verified 20,610 children taken from occupied territory into Russia and Russian-held areas. They are given Russian passports, Russian names, Russian textbooks, and told their country no longer exists. Roughly 2,100 have come home. That leaves tens of thousands of parents who still do not know which building their child sleeps in tonight. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that these deportations amount to crimes against humanity.

Forcibly transferring the children of a group to another group is named, by treaty, as an act of genocide.

Source: UN Commission of Inquiry — deportation of Ukrainian children

Civilians, including a small child, crossing the destroyed Irpin river bridge on wooden planks while fleeing Russian advance. (Yan Boechat / VOA · Public domain)

03 — The orphans

803 children are dead. The rest are burying their parents.

16,431civilians confirmed killed — the true number is far higher

The UN has verified at least 16,431 civilians killed, including 803 children, and 48,613 wounded, including 2,960 children — and it only counts what it can independently confirm. The killing is accelerating, not winding down: civilian deaths in the first half of 2026 were 37% higher than 2025 and 114% higher than 2024. Every one of those numbers leaves behind a child who now answers the question “where is your mother” in the past tense.

July 2026 alone: 437 civilians killed, 2,610 injured. A 30% jump over the month before.

Source: OHCHR — Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict

Aerial view of burned-out apartment blocks in the Livoberezhnyi district of Mariupol beside the Sea of Azov. (Mariupol City Council · Public domain)

04 — Erased cities

Mariupol is 90% rubble. Nobody is going home.

6M+Ukrainians displaced inside their own country

Mariupol, a city of 400,000, had up to 90% of its buildings damaged or destroyed. Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Popasna, Severodonetsk — largely uninhabitable. More than 1.5 million homes have been damaged or destroyed and over 6 million Ukrainians are displaced inside their own country, with millions more abroad. These are not battles that moved through towns. The towns were the target.

Reconstruction is now estimated at $588 billion. There is no line item for the streets people grew up on.

Source: World Bank / UN damage assessments

A family home in Kherson with its roof torn open and walls shredded by shrapnel after a Russian strike. (National Police of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0)

05 — Human safari

In Kherson, they hunt pedestrians with drones. For sport.

200+civilians killed by drones hunting people in Kherson

Since 2024, Russian operators in Kherson have flown grenade-carrying drones down residential streets, watching a live video feed, and dropped explosives on people walking to the shop, riding bicycles, waiting at bus stops. Ukrainians call it the human safari. The UN Commission of Inquiry found at least 200 civilians killed and over 2,000 wounded, and ruled the campaign widespread, systematic, and a coordinated state policy — crimes against humanity.

In August 2026 a “safari” drone struck a civilian minibus, killing at least four people.

Source: UN commission: Kherson drone attacks are crimes against humanity

Ukrainian firefighters directing hoses at a kindergarten in Kherson engulfed in flames after Russian shelling. (State Emergency Service of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0)

06 — Freezing the country

They bomb the heat in January and call it a military target.

17regions with energy infrastructure hit in a single month

In January 2026 alone, Russia struck Ukraine’s power grid almost daily, including five mass barrages, damaging or destroying energy infrastructure across at least 17 regions plus Kyiv. Millions of people had electricity for a few hours a day through one of the harshest winters on record — no heat, no water pumps, no light, in temperatures well below freezing. One wave used 34 missiles and 339 drones. Hospitals, schools and kindergartens are hit in the same barrages.

It is not an accident when you aim at the furnace in the middle of winter. It is the plan.

Source: UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine

And it came for the athletes too.

650+

Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed by Russian forces

800+

sports facilities destroyed, including 20 Olympic training centres

929

goals Alex Ovechkin has scored while all of that happened

On September 12, 2026, a Russian Kalibr cruise missile destroyed the Odesa apartment of Ukrainian tennis player Dayana Yastremska. Two people were killed and twenty-six wounded, including a child.

“A Russian missile destroyed our apartment in Odesa. The only thing that survived was a Roland Garros towel.”

Five days later, a fellow professional athlete was asked on camera about the party that ordered it. He said he supports his country, and hoped for peace and love.

Other athletes had the same choice.
They chose differently.

Nikita Zadorov

Boston Bruins · Russian

Posted “No War” within days of the 2022 invasion and has denounced the war in interviews, including with Russian journalists. He says he cannot return to Russia while Putin is president. He accepted exile from his own country rather than lend his name to it.

Luz Long

Germany · 1936 Olympics

The Nazis’ blond, blue-eyed poster boy for Aryan supremacy. In front of Hitler and a stadium of party officials, he embraced Jesse Owens — the Black American who had just beaten him — and walked a lap arm in arm with him.

Albert Richter

Germany · track cycling

Refused to race in a jersey bearing Nazi symbols, refused the salute from the podium, and refused to drop his Jewish coach. The Gestapo killed him in 1940.

Werner Seelenbinder

Germany · wrestling

World-class Olympic wrestler who worked as an underground courier for the anti-Nazi resistance. Executed in 1944.

Three of them paid with their lives. One of them lives in exile. Ovechkin was asked to pay nothing at all — just to say nothing. He volunteered instead.

Twelve years of receipts

This was never one bad afternoon.

Four press photographs of Alex Ovechkin with Vladimir Putin over the years: a Kremlin handshake, an embrace in the Russian national team locker room, Putin on the ice in a Night Hockey League jersey, and Ovechkin receiving a presidential certificate of gratitude. — A decade of Kremlin photo-ops, assembled by campaigners. The photographs are genuine press images; the central emblem is an editorial addition by whoever made the collage.

2014
“Save children from fascism”
Months after Russia seized Crimea and opened the war in Donbas, Ovechkin posts a photo of himself holding a #SAVECHILDRENFROMFASCISM sign — the exact slogan the Kremlin was using to justify the invasion, at the height of a fabricated atrocity campaign against Ukrainians.
2017
He founds PutinTeam
Ahead of Putin’s re-election, Ovechkin launches a social movement called PutinTeam and calls it apolitical. The Kremlin disagrees: spokesman Dmitry Peskov publicly welcomes “his wish to express his support of our president, especially from abroad.”
2022
“Please, no more war” — then silence
Three days into the full-scale invasion he says eleven words, keeps a photo of himself with Putin as his profile picture, and says nothing further as Bucha, Mariupol and Izium are uncovered.
Sept 2026
He films a campaign ad for Putin’s party
Days before Russia’s Duma elections, Ovechkin appears in a United Russia campaign spot, standing behind Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — sanctioned by the US, UK, EU and Canada, and identified by the US Treasury as an architect of the invasion of Ukraine.
Sept 17, 2026
“I’m Russian and I support my country.”
Asked whether he hesitated before filming it, Ovechkin answers: “No.” He adds that he hopes for “peace and love,” that his home is Russia, and that he will live there when he retires.
Sept 18, 2026
Latvia bans him for life
Latvia’s Foreign Minister Baiba Braže declares Ovechkin persona non grata and bars him from entering the country indefinitely, citing the Immigration Law. A NATO country has decided he is a problem. His employer has decided he is a pillar of the community.

You are not powerless.
You are the revenue.

Nobody is asking you to hate a hockey player. We are asking you to stop paying one who campaigns for the government doing this. Every jersey, every ticket, every stream is a vote that this is acceptable. It is not.

Sign the petition

Ask the Washington Capitals to end their association with Ovechkin. It takes eleven seconds. Do it before you scroll away.

Don’t buy the merchandise

No #8 jersey. No signed puck. No commemorative goal record memorabilia. Not this year.

Don’t buy the ticket

Go to a different game. Watch a different team. There are 31 others and none of them campaigned for United Russia.

Say it out loud

Send this page to one person who follows the Caps. The reason this works is that most fans genuinely do not know what he said last week.

Sign the petition

Hosted on Change.org · opens in a new tab

Editorial photomontage: Alex Ovechkin in his Washington Capitals jersey, kneeling on a rink of blood in front of bombed-out apartment blocks. — Editorial illustration — a composite image, not a photograph. Every other image on this page is documentary.

He told you exactly who he supports.
Believe him.

The greatest goal scorer in hockey history had one thing to say about a war of annihilation, and he used it to endorse the party running it.