Laura Loomer — the far-right influencer who once cheerled for Russia and has the ear of the President of the United States — sat down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv and came out the other side admitting she had believed "a lot of untrue things" about Ukraine. She then called Trump directly. And somehow, against every law of political physics, it appears to have worked.
From 'Dictator' to Dinner Guest
Cast your mind back to February 2025. Trump publicly ambushed Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, berated him in front of cameras, and effectively threw him out of the White House. It was one of the most humiliating diplomatic spectacles in modern American history. The MAGA base cheered. Tucker and his friends nodded along. Ukraine was the enemy, or close enough.
Fast forward to now. According to The Guardian, Trump and Zelenskyy met again at the White House this week — this time for the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had remained one of Ukraine's most vocal Republican defenders until his death. At NATO's summit in Ankara earlier this month, Trump praised Zelenskyy in terms that would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago and announced licenses for Ukraine to develop its own Patriot missile interceptors. He walked part of that back at a cabinet meeting on Friday, because of course he did, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former White House adviser on European affairs, told The Guardian bluntly: "We've gone from a phase in which he was throwing Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office, and turning his back on him, to a situation today where they seem to have a reasonably good relationship, and where there have now been a succession of meetings that have gone well." That is a diplomatic way of saying something genuinely strange is happening.
The Loomer Factor, Which Is a Sentence Nobody Expected to Write
Here is where it gets truly surreal. Laura Loomer — banned from multiple platforms, a devoted amplifier of Russian-friendly narratives, a person whose judgment on geopolitics was previously indistinguishable from a Kremlin content farm — traveled to Kyiv and met with Zelenskyy. After that meeting, The Guardian reports, she publicly admitted she had been "bamboozled" by Russian propaganda.
"Bamboozled." Her word. She said she had called Trump afterward and that her reversal was shifting sentiment across the MAGA movement. Which, if true, tells you everything you need to know about how American foreign policy is currently being made. Not by generals, not by intelligence briefings, not by the State Department — by a social media influencer who needed a Kyiv field trip to figure out that Russia might not be the good guys.
Credit where it is due: she changed her mind and said so out loud. That takes something, in a political movement where admitting error is treated as treason. But the fact that this was apparently a meaningful input into Trump's foreign policy recalibration is its own kind of horror.
Iran Is the Real Engine Here
The Loomer story is the wild detail, but The Guardian's reporting points to something more structural driving this reset. On February 28 of this year, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. A memorandum of understanding signed in June was supposed to produce a 60-day ceasefire. That ceasefire is now dead, hostilities have resumed, and Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — the waterway through which a significant chunk of global oil trade moves — threatening to detonate the world economy.
Tehran has also been hitting US military bases and infrastructure in Gulf allied nations with drone strikes. The particular weapon Iran has been using? Shahed drones — the same Iranian-made drones that Russia has been raining down on Ukrainian cities since 2022. Ukraine, having survived years of Shahed attacks, has become arguably the world leader in defensive drone technology. Suddenly the country Trump was treating as a charity case has something the United States actually needs.
Trita Parsi, an Iranian analyst and vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Guardian: "At a moment when he is stuck in a war, faced with bad military options, and suddenly the Ukrainians are approaching him no longer asking for American charity but offering help, I find it quite plausible that that could be a reason, amongst many probably, as to why Trump's attitude appears to have shifted in a rather strong way." That is a careful, qualified assessment. The uncareful version is: Trump needs Ukraine now, and Zelenskyy knows it.
Ukraine Starts Playing Offense
Zelenskyy, to his credit, has not wasted the moment. He told UK MPs in March that Ukraine had dispatched 200 military experts to 11 countries across the Gulf — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait — to advise on countering Shahed drone attacks. Ukraine is now selling its hard-won knowledge directly to the countries currently under fire from the weapons it spent years learning to stop.
Last weekend, Ukraine went further, striking an Iranian commercial vessel on the Caspian Sea. Kyiv says the ship was transporting arms to Russia. Iran says a sailor was killed and threatened retaliation. Whatever the full picture, it is a dramatic escalation — Ukraine opening a second front, or at minimum making itself a more active participant in the Iran conflict.
Zelenskyy has also been sharing intelligence suggesting Russia is actively helping Iran target US assets. He posted on X that since early July, Ukraine had "recorded active Russian satellite surveillance of the Gulf states and US military facilities located there" and that these images were subsequently appearing in Iran, with a "clear correlation" between Russian satellite imagery and Iranian strike patterns. If that intelligence holds up, it is the kind of thing that tends to cut through even the thickest ideological fog.
What Putin Got Wrong
There is a bitter irony baked into all of this that deserves a moment. Putin spent years betting that Trump's America would eventually abandon Ukraine — and for a while, that bet looked like a winner. Trump came in, froze military aid, publicly humiliated Zelenskyy, and made noises about cutting a deal that would hand Russia most of what it wanted.
But Putin's stubborn refusal to accept multiple favorable peace offers — even as Trump reportedly pressured Ukraine into concession after concession — kept the war alive long enough for the strategic situation to flip. And now the same Iranian drones that Russia used to hammer Ukrainian cities are attacking US military facilities in the Gulf, and Ukraine is the country with the expertise to help stop them. The Guardian notes that Trump's mercurial preference for backing a winner is also likely in play here — and right now, Ukraine looks a lot more like a winner than it did eighteen months ago.
Putin overplayed his hand. He had the American president in his corner, or close enough, and he threw it away by being unwilling to take yes for an answer.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is normal great-power statecraft — that the US-Ukraine relationship has matured through careful diplomacy and strategic reassessment. It has not. What actually happened is that a social media influencer got a Kyiv briefing, called the president, and moved the needle. The rest is being driven by Iran having the audacity to use the same drones on US targets that Russia used on Ukrainian apartment blocks, which forced the White House to notice that Ukraine had spent three years developing exactly the expertise the Pentagon now desperately needs. This is not strategy. This is chaos occasionally landing in a useful place.
The part that should keep you up at night is not even the Laura Loomer chapter, as deranged as that is. It is that Ukraine striking an Iranian ship on the Caspian Sea last weekend suggests these two conflicts are actively merging into something nobody has fully mapped out. Zelenskyy is smart enough to understand that his leverage is highest right now, while Trump is stuck in a Middle East war with no clean exit. He is using it. That is entirely rational. But the potential for miscalculation — two nuclear-adjacent conflicts threading together, with Trump at the center of both — is not a comfortable thought.
Putin had Trump's ear and blew it. Iran is getting hit from two directions and one of them is Kyiv. Laura Loomer is now a voice for Ukrainian sovereignty. Everything is stupid and nothing makes sense and somehow the outcome might accidentally be less catastrophic than it looked eighteen months ago. The bar is on the floor. We are still not sure we cleared it.
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