Ukraine has taken the step of banning Hollywood actor Steven Seagal from the country, deeming him to be a threat to national security, according to several news outlets.

Security services in the eastern European state claim that they have forbidden Seagal from entering the country for a period of five years, in a letter published by news site Apostrophe and later confirmed by the security service’s press secretary to other media publications, including The Guardian.

Steven SeagalSteven Seagal has been banned from Ukraine

Seagal, who has previously spoken out in support of Russia, which is backing separatists in the east of Ukraine, is just the latest of a number of high-profile names who are banned from entering the country. It comes after Seagal received Russian citizenship, with president Vladimir Putin giving the star a Russian passport and telling him he hoped their “personal relationship will remain and continue” during a meeting in the Kremlin in 2016.

The letter says that decisions like this are taken when an individual has “committed socially dangerous actions… that contradict the interests of maintaining Ukraine’s security.”

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The 65 year old actor earned the distrust of Ukrainian authorities when he described Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea as “very reasonable”. He also later played with his blues band at a concert in Crimea organised by a pro-Putin biker club, with the flag of eastern Ukraine separatist groups flying onstage.

In 2015, he was blacklisted with a number of Russian celebrities and artists, as well as French actor Gerard Depardieu, as among those who “speak out in support of violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine”.

A cultural war between Ukraine and Russia has been rumbling into this year, with Ukraine banning the Russian Eurovision Song Contest entrant, Yulia Samoilova, from the 2017 contest that is being hosted in Kiev because she performed in the Crimea in 2015.

More: Steven Seagal plays to pro-Russian separatists in the Crimea. Really.