In November 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on accepting Seagal into Russian citizenship. In August 2018, Seagal became the special representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry for humanitarian relations between Moscow and Washington. Putin also awarded the actor with the Order of Friendship.
As Seagal stated in an interview, his paternal grandfather was born in one of the Buddhist regions of Russia and moved to the United States in the first half of the 20th century. He also mentioned that his grandmother was from Vladivostok and that some of his ancestors came from St. Petersburg and Belarus. The actor traveled to Kalmykia, Tuva and Yakutia in search of information about his family.