Alex Ovechkin appears in United Russia campaign ad

Alex Ovechkin has appeared in a campaign advertisement for the pro-Putin United Russia party, images published by the Russian business paper Vedomosti

The pictures show the 40-year-old alongside Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, the leading candidate on United Russia's parliamentary list, and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the RT network.

Ovechkin's backing of Vladimir Putin goes back years. In 2017 he founded Putin Team, a movement he said was meant to unite

"people who are proud of their Country and want to make Russia stronger."

He praised the Russian president's

"trust in and Respect for his people, his fairness [and] righteousness, and the fact that he really cares."

His tone shifted, by all accounts, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a war that has since killed hundreds of thousands. Ovechkin said he hoped it

"was going to be over and we are going to be living in a good world,"

Though he still called Putin

"my president."

Ovechkin signed a one-year extension with the Capitals in July. He has played his whole NHL career at the club since Washington took him first overall in the 2004 draft, and he captained the side to the Stanley Cup in 2018. passing Wayne Gretzky's all-time record, a mark that had stood since 1999.

None of that history was in dispute before the Vedomosti pictures. What changes now is the setting: a United Russia campaign ad puts the league's leading goalscorer in frame with at a point when his previous caution on the war had left his politics harder to read.