No, no, it's not April 1 and this “news†would have been relayed on June 26 by several Iranian media, citing the Russian state news agency Sputnik as a reliable source. The news is all the more credible as we know the two men are close, the American actor Steven Seagal not hesitating to actively defend the Russian president for his offensive against Ukraine.
Steven Seagal installed in Russia since 2021
Last February, Vladimir Putin even decorated the star of American action films with the Order of Friendship for “his great contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperationâ€. In 2016, Steven Seagal received a Russian passport from Vladimir Putin himself, while retaining his American citizenship. And it has been installed in Russia since 2021.
Sputnik or Not Sputnik ?
After investigation, Newsweek has become certain that the Iranian media had in fact been the victims of a perfectly orchestrated and credible hoax on social networks. The articles, which referred to Sputnik as a source for Iranian media, appear to have since been removed from Fars News, IRGC and other outlets, and their Telegram accounts, which have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Newsweek, which searched the Sputnik site and Telegram feeds, found no further record of the publication of this story. As media outlets and other social media users point out, the original source of Iranian press confusion may have been the fake “Not Sputnik†account, which regularly parodies the Russian state media news site. The worst thing about this incredible story is that we live in a world that is so upside down that such news could very well have happened!
