On the face of it, the Russian actor Yura Borisov was an unlikely actor to land an Oscar nomination in 2025.

Just a few years ago he played a guileless soldier in a Kremlin-sponsored movie that celebrated a Soviet tank model. Later, he starred in a biopic of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who invented the Russian automatic rifle.

But after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he stopped playing in militaristic movies. Last year, Western audiences fell in love with him as a tight-lipped but sentimental mafia errand boy in “Anora,” a Brooklyn-based indie dramedy about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch.

At the Academy Awards on Sunday, Borisov is up for best supporting actor for the role.

The war in Ukraine cut many Russian artists off from the West, but Borisov has been among the few who managed to transcend the dividing lines. He has continued a career in Russia, without endorsing or condemning the war, while in the West, he has evaded being seen as a representative of state-sponsored Russian culture.

“Borisov hasn’t picked a side,” said Anton Dolin, a leading Russian film critic. “Maybe he is just very smart, or maybe he thinks he is not smart enough,” Dolin said by phone from Riga, Latvia, where he now lives in exile.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dolin added. “His behavior and strategy have been impeccable.”

Today, Borisov is one of Russia’s biggest international stars. In Moscow, where some filmmakers have declared loudly that Hollywood was an irrelevant nest of decadence, the cinema crowd has been swept up in “Yuramania” over his Oscar nomination. His public appearances have been followed closely by fans on social media, and he has become the subject of countless online memes.

Many Russians saw Borisov’s nomination as proof that the country was breaking through what officials have described as “a cultural wall” erected around Russia by the nefarious West.

“Everyone talks about Yura,” said Katya Mtsituridze, a film critic in Moscow and former chief editor of Variety Russia. “And Shaun Baker is perceived almost as a Russian filmmaker,” she added, referring to the director and screenwriter of “Anora.” “This is a film where Russians are good and sincere — they are true Chekhovian characters,” she said.

Over the past weeks, Borisov, who grew up in a humble family in a town outside Moscow, has been on the road campaigning for awards for “Anora” and attending glittering ceremonies. When he has made it back to Moscow, he has been promoting another patriotic film, in which he plays Aleksander Pushkin, Russia’s celebrated poet.

This week, Borisov arrived in Los Angeles to prepare for the Oscars ceremony. After multiple requests through his agent, family and friends, a representative declined an interview request for this article, citing the actor’s award season commitments.

While Borisov’s performances can seem effortless, as if he simply plays himself, he actually labors over his craft. For the role of a crude Russian miner in the Finnish movie “Compartment No. 6,” he thought about getting a tooth removed to look rougher, he said in an interview with a Russian blogger. For another part, he added, he tried drugs to work out how an addict would behave. (He never wanted to play a drug addict again, he said.)

In three movies he made in 2021, Borisov played parts that could potentially alienate him from the Russian authorities.

He played a secret agent trying to redeem his sins in “Captain Volkonogov,” an anti-totalitarian film that was effectively banned in Russia. He was featured in “Petrov’s Flu,” a phantasmagorial movie by Kirill Serebrennikov, the darling of Russia’s anti-Kremlin intelligentsia in exile. And he appeared as a Russian mercenary in Syria in “Mama, I’m Home,” a rare film to explore the Kremlin’s shadow war for influence in the Middle East and its effects at home in Russia.

“He is a rare artist who hasn’t been blacklisted,” said Dolin, the critic. But, since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he added, Borisov “also hasn’t discredited himself by taking part in outright propaganda projects.”

Borisov has transcended boundaries — just like “Anora,” which was a huge but unlikely success in Russia.

The movie had a wide theatrical release across the country, and was bought by Kinopoisk, Russia’s leading streaming service. A spokeswoman for the platform said that more than 2.4 million subscribers had watched it, and it was Kinopoisk’s most popular film in January.

Part of this has to do with a thirst for Western movies. Major Hollywood studios like Disney and Sony pulled out of the Russian market in 2022, but independent movies like “Anora” can still get released. And Russians rush to theaters to watch them.

Members of the pro-Western elite were so enthusiastic about the success of “Anora” that some Russian nationalists grew irritated. Yegor Kholmogorov, a firebrand pro-Kremlin commentator, said that the buzz around the movie showed that Russians were always looking for confirmation from the West.

In a scathing article about the movie on a Russian nationalist website, he said that the furor confirmed that members of the Russian elite were “wandering around, looking for a shot of praise” from the West — “like drug addicts looking for a fix.”

The success of the movie, and Borisov’s nomination, have also had a polarizing effect on anti-Kremlin forces.

Pro-Ukraine activists argued that lauding a film with Russian oligarchs and gangsters at its center was tone deaf while their country fights against Moscow’s aggression. And among Russian exiles, many worried that Borisov’s nomination signaled a return to normalcy in Russia’s cultural relations with the West.

“Those who see in any Russian success the triumph of Russian weapons, of Putin — of course they were very upset,” Dolin said.

But inside Russia, even conservatives like Nikita Mikhalkov, an Oscar-winning director who has been lashing out on state television against what he sees as the depraved culture of the West, wished Borisov success at Sunday’s ceremony.

“He is doing his job well there,” Mikhalkov said.