What’s behind Maga influencer Laura Loomer’s about-face on Ukraine?

Laura Loomer, the online Maga provocateur, has never worked in the White House or anywhere else in the government, but her sudden conversion to the Ukrainian cause this week is significant because her social media posts often have real policy implications in the second Trump administration.The rightwing commentator has spent the last few days in Kyiv, where she announced a newfound sympathy for Ukraine in its long war with Russia, and admitted that she had previously fallen for Russian propaganda.Loomer – who has previously echoed Kremlin talking points to her 2 million followers on social media – has enjoyed direct access to Trump since the 2024 presidential campaign. During the early months after Trump returned to office, Loomer used her online presence to push for ideological purges of government personnel, including many in the national security arena.For a time, her power to break careers among foreign policy officials made her seem as if she were Trump’s de facto national security adviser.It is unclear whether she still has that kind of pull inside the White House, but Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, certainly took her seriously when she arrived this week, holding a private meeting with her on Thursday.Three days earlier, Loomer posted about experiencing her first air raid, as Russian missiles pounded the Ukrainian capital“This is everyday for every Ukrainian,” she posting, adding she felt that she had been “an asshole for minimizing the struggle of Ukrainians for the last 5 years”.“I often said I don’t care. Looking back, that wasn’t very nice of me to say. There are people in Ukraine who have to run to a bomb shelter everyday and some of us had the audacity to say Russia wasn’t wrong because we believed the lie that Ukraine is a country full of Nazi sympathizers. We have been so propagandized by Russia and we don’t even realize it.”Before their meeting on Thursday, Zelenskyy’s office posted a statement saying: “It is really important that @LauraLoomer is in Ukraine and sees things with her own eyes as they are.”Loomer’s change of heart is potentially important not only because she is close to Trump, but also because she has long served as a reliable barometer of Maga attitudes.Loomer has long been disdainful of Ukraine, adopting what could only be described as a pro-Russian perspective. Many in Maga circles have for years held positive views of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, thanks to Russian propaganda that portrayed him as a bulwark against homosexuality and a defender of fundamentalist Christianity. They became convinced that the Russia-Ukraine war was a proxy fight between Russia’s fundamentalist Christianity and the EU’s western secularism.Loomer’s shift comes at a critical moment for Ukraine, which recently lost one of its strongest supporters in Washington with the death this month of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who had consistently pushed for increased sanctions on Russia to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.But Loomer’s change also coincides with what appears to be an important recent shift in Trump’s own views on Ukraine.Trump returned to office openly hating Ukraine, at least in part because of the 2019 impeachment over his attempt to hold up aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden. Early in his second term, Trump humiliated Zelenskyy in an Oval Office meeting, cut off direct the supply of US weapons and forced Ukraine’s European allies to buy American weapons for Kyiv instead.But Trump likes winners, and even without full support from Washington, Ukraine has been able to slow Russia’s advance. Kyiv has become a global leader in drone technology, and it has taken the war to Russia itself with long-range missile attacks on the country’s oil infrastructure, leading to an energy crisis in one of the world’s biggest oil-producing nations.Clearly impressed with Ukraine’s performance, Trump announced at the Nato summit in Turkey earlier this month that the US would license Patriot missile technology to Ukraine, allowing Kyiv to produce the advanced air defense missiles on its own.At the same time, Trump also supported a move in Congress, which had been backed by Graham, to impose new sanctions on Russia, while also seeming to back off an earlier insistence that Ukraine would have to agree to give up large swaths of territory in exchange for any US-brokered peace deal with Russia.Trump’s policy shifts were modest, but significant; it is possible that Loomer changed her position simply in order to stay in lockstep with Trump.But her about-face could be even more politically significant if it represents a broader thawing of Maga attitudes towards Ukraine and an awakening to the dangers of Russian propaganda.