A Charm Campaign in the Trenches: How Kyiv Talked Its Way Into MAGA’s Good Graces

A far-right activist and one of President Trump’s most vocal online allies, Laura Loomer, spent years building a following by branding Ukraine’s war against Russia as a distraction unworthy of American attention.But late last month she was in Kyiv, sheltering underground during a missile alert, as she recorded an interview with President Volodymyr Zelensky and shared that she had come to believe she had been “bamboozled by Russian propaganda.”The clip of her sit-down with Mr. Zelensky reached President Trump, who reposted it on Truth Social with a two-word verdict of approval: “Very good!!!”Ms. Loomer’s reversal came just before Mr. Zelensky sat down with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last Tuesday, a meeting both sides described as productive and focused on licensing Ukraine to build its own Patriot interceptors domestically, along with reviving stalled diplomacy with Moscow.It was a striking turn from the shouting match that erupted between the two leaders in the same room roughly a year and a half earlier.The shift, however, did not happen by accident, according to the analysts and strategists tracking it.“I was on a MAGA radio show a few weeks back,” a former Republican congressional chief of staff and the founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, Steven Moore, tells The New York Sun. “The host said, ‘I like having you on. For years, I have had guests who told me Kyiv would fall in 30 days or Russia would break through the front by summer. You are the only one who tells me the things that actually happen.’ The Russians spend $2 billion annually on propaganda worldwide, much of it directed at conservatives. But even in today’s world, the truth still works.”Ultimately, Mr. Moore is saying that the repeated predictions of Ukraine’s collapse were not borne out, and that has cost the skeptics credibility with their own audiences. His point about Russian spending is simpler still: Some of the pessimism on the right didn’t grow on its own; it was planted and now is being overtaken by real reporting from the ground.So if a political influencer who once dismissed Ukraine as someone else’s fight is now standing in a Kyiv bomb shelter apologizing to its president, the question worth asking is: Who did the persuading, and why is it working on her when it hasn’t worked on everyone else?A Deliberate CampaignMs. Loomer, however, is hardly alone in her change of heart.A prominent conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, traveled overland from Warsaw to Kyiv last spring to interview Mr. Zelensky near St. Sophia Cathedral, and has since sparred publicly with Tucker Carlson over the war, at one point calling him a coward. Even MAGA-aligned Tim Pool, whose commentary once tracked closely with Kremlin talking points, has more recently posted support for Ukraine’s fight for survival — a notable shift for a broadcaster whose past ties to Moscow ran deeper than most.Prosecutors have a different story about where some of the support for Russia came from. Mr. Pool, along with commentators Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Tennessee media company that turned out to be funded by Russian state media operatives, according to the Justice Department. Roughly $10 million moved through that operation to conservative influencers between 2023 and 2024.Mr. Pool has said he had no idea where the money came from and has called himself a victim of the operation. Still, the episode is a reminder of how directly Moscow has worked to shape conservative media commentary on the war, and it helps explain why Ukraine’s advocates have treated winning back this particular audience as such a high priority.American journalists based in Ukraine, along with veterans turned advocates, have spent years trying to understand — rather than dismiss — conservative skepticism about the war before attempting to shift it.Mr. Moore, for one, arrived in the country five days after Russia’s full-scale invasion began and noticed almost nobody in Washington had stood on both the front line of a war and the floor of the House of Representatives. His organization has pushed back on claims from broadcasters sympathetic to Moscow’s narrative, including a widely repeated allegation in late 2022 that Mr. Zelensky was persecuting Christians. He countered it with testimony from an evangelical pastor, Viktor Cherniavskyi, who says he was tortured by Russian forces for 25 days in occupied Luhansk.Mr. Moore’s team walked the halls themselves, hitting roughly 100 congressional offices and buying digital ads in districts that mattered. By April 2024, lawmakers had let a $60-billion Ukraine aid package reach the House floor — a result that Mr. Moore’s group is credited with helping bring about.Ms. Loomer’s turnaround is significant less for its ability to change anyone’s mind than for what it represents diplomatically, Mr. Moore says.“Neither the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv nor the Ukrainian embassy in D.C. has an ambassador right now,” he notes. “Yet diplomacy is taking place around Loomer’s trip. Her trip to Ukraine is very significant.”Not everyone tracking the shift agrees on how far it extends.A political strategist and the managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, tells the Sun that the recalibration among some MAGA voices reflects growing alarm at Russia’s alignment with Iran, China, and North Korea more than an embrace of long-standing foreign policy understandings.“Supporting Ukraine is increasingly framed less as open-ended nation-building and more as a way to bleed a hostile axis without committing American troops,” Mr. Thomas explains. “It’s still conditional and transactional but not a full embrace of the prior interventionist consensus.”He cautions that Ms. Loomer’s influence, while real among a vocal segment of the movement’s online ecosystem, has not yet produced “a decisive realignment of the wider MAGA electorate.”A global risk analyst, Dennis Santiago, is more skeptical still that any single personality is driving the shift in attitudes.“It is pure fantasy to suggest that echo chamber personalities are the cause of altering broad opinion,” Mr. Santiago tells the Sun. He points instead to Russia’s own conduct on the battlefield.“Far more important are the actions of the Russians themselves, who have resumed their behaviors to target civilians, making it difficult for U.S. policy makers who wish to pursue a negotiated solution,” he says. He believes Moscow’s transgressions are deliberate since President [Vladimir] Putin has shown no interest in an outcome that looks like compromise.The Iran EffectThe more recent break in conservative media’s wall of skepticism traces to an unexpected source: the movement’s internal rupture over Israel.An interview with Mr. Zelensky by podcaster Lex Fridman in January 2025 drew millions of views and cracked open a conservative media landscape that had largely written off Ukraine’s cause; a prominent conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, followed months later with his own trip to Kyiv.Then Israel’s June 2025 confrontation with Iran — a country Kyiv already regarded as an adversary because of its drone shipments to Moscow — made it harder for some conservatives to cast Russia as a Christian ally as long as it relied on Tehran’s weapons.The drone connection is the crux of the argument, Mr. Moore says.“Iran designed cheap drones called Shaheds. Putin launched 57,000 of them into Ukraine in the last few years and improved them to be faster, quieter, longer range, and carry a larger payload,” he explains. “He has sent those improved drones back to Iran to kill U.S. service members. Meanwhile, Ukraine sent interceptors to defend our troops and allies in the Gulf. Putin is making it quite obvious he is our enemy.”Mr. Thomas sees that conflict reshaping perceptions of Moscow more than Kyiv.“Russia’s alignment with Tehran, its willingness to supply Iran with advanced weaponry, and its role as a spoiler in the region have made Russia look less like a traditional great-power rival and more like part of an anti-Western axis,” he says, noting that this has strengthened the case for constraining Russia even among conservatives who still oppose unlimited Ukraine funding.A Fragile MomentumThe death on July 11 of Senator Lindsey Graham, who collapsed at his Capitol Hill home just hours after returning from his 10th wartime visit to Ukraine, has stripped Ukraine’s advocates of one of their most effective voices in the Senate even as momentum builds elsewhere.Mr. Zelensky attended a service honoring the senator on Tuesday, the same day he met privately with Mr. Trump on the Patriot licensing deal.That warmth between the two leaders has been building for weeks. Earlier this month at the NATO summit in Turkey, Mr. Trump said he would grant Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors domestically. Tuesday’s Oval Office sit-down, described by both sides as productive, marked the second meeting between the two this month and passed without the public confrontation that defined their encounter in February 2025.Mr. Trump’s own posture toward Kyiv is not a sign of any deeper conversion, Mr. Thomas argues.“Trump’s warmer tone toward Zelensky is largely symbolic and tactical at this stage,” he believes. “He has always prioritized leverage and negotiation over ideological commitment. The shift appears designed to increase pressure on both sides rather than signal a fundamental policy conversion.”Mr. Santiago sees it as not a shift at all. Rather, he sees a continuation of the policy Washington has held all along.“Trump’s tone with respect to Zelensky is entirely consistent with the official U.S. position that we want to pursue a policy of conditional support towards a negotiated outcome to this war,” he tells the Sun, describing Washington’s aim as building “a face-saving offramp” for Mr. Putin.Whatever divides the analysts on how far the realignment reaches, Mr. Moore sees Moscow’s battlefield losses, not messaging, as the real driver of conservative opinion.“We have been running commercials, Putin Is a Loser, for months targeting West Wing insiders,” he says. “Russia has [suffered] 1.4 million [casualties]. Black smoke is now a fixture on the Moscow skyline. Putin had to ask Trump to ask Zelensky not to bomb his May 9 military parade. That is not a power move. Putin is a loser. Trump likes winners.”

A Charm Campaign in the Trenches: How Kyiv Talked Its Way Into MAGA’s Good Graces

A Charm Campaign in the Trenches: How Kyiv Talked Its Way Into MAGA’s Good Graces

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