The first air raid siren of my life went off two days after I arrived in Kyiv. I had heard that sound in a thousand video clips, but it hits different firsthand — when people walking down the street quietly check Telegram to diagnose the missile’s origin and likely target. One day before I arrived, a Russian strike on Kyiv killed six people. Another killed more than ten while I was there.
I owe my readers the truth: I was wrong about Ukraine.
For years, I used my platform to ignore the brutality of Russia’s invasion, to minimize the existential fight of the Ukrainian people, and to repeat claims that I now know — because I traveled to Ukraine and went on a fact finding expedition myself — were manufactured in Moscow. In 2021, I wrote several articles for RT, the Kremlin’s “news” network. I was, as I told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders to their faces when I was recently in Ukraine, bamboozled by Russian propaganda. Regrettably, I passed that twisted messaging along to millions of Americans who trusted me, and although I was never paid by RT, I realize how I was exploited to push an ulterior narrative.
How does that happen to someone whose entire brand is built on reporting uncomfortable truths?
The honest answer is that Russian propaganda is engineered for people exactly like me. I built my career on the conviction that the institutions lying to Americans — the media, the intelligence agencies, the foreign policy establishment — deserved no benefit of the doubt. I was deplatformed, debarked, mocked and written off for saying so. For years, I was denied the ability to have a digital platform by the Big Tech social media companies and their enablers in the Democrat Party who cheered as my voice was silenced. I was filled with rage and felt a sense of relief when I was approached by RT after the 2020 Presidential election and offered a byline on their website to “let my voice be heard”.
After Crimea was seized during the Obama-Biden administration, after the full-scale invasion came under Biden, and after twenty years of the foreign policy establishment being wrong without ever paying a price, my instinct, the MAGA instinct, was that anything the establishment supported must be a lie. They never had to convince me to love Russia. They only had to feed my distrust of the people telling me to support Ukraine. And it worked, because I was filled with rage for the establishment and my rage was capitalized.
Over the last year, I’ve watched in frustration as the Woke Reich has spread Russian propaganda as a way to undermine the Trump administration and divide the MAGA base. After witnessing several Woke Reich podcasters travel to Russia where they engaged in promoting Russian narratives, I decided to travel to Ukraine to try to verify the claims I had spent years repeating, and I promised my audience I would report back whatever I found — even if the claims didn’t hold up. They did not.
On my first day, I visited a mass grave beside St. Andrew’s Church in Bucha, an upscale suburb of Kyiv, filled with civilians murdered by Russian forces. The photographs of the dead in shallow, hastily dug pits were indistinguishable from the black-and-white images of Nazi and Soviet atrocities in history books. Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk told me residents were not even allowed to put the dead in body bags. Bullet holes still riddle the fences and the exterior of the church. A Ukrainian special operator on our security detail had helped clear Bucha after the occupation. Looking at the photos, he quietly teared up and said, “I know these houses.” That was the moment the last of my doubts died. Russian propaganda cannot fake a soldier crying over houses he knows by name.
At the Ukrainian military intelligence’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, I spoke with three Ukrainian soldiers exchanged for Russian captives. Each had been starved, beaten, electrocuted — and worse. One soldier’s life was saved by a Russian surgeon who refused to use anesthesia, and then burned a large “Z,” the symbol of the invasion, beside the surgical scar to permanently brand the Ukrainian.
I visited the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity, founded in 1051, roughly a century before Moscow first appears in the historical record. Weeks earlier, a Russian Shahed drone was fired into it, nearly destroying statues of Jesus and Mary.
In Dnipro and Kharkiv, cities so frequently targeted by ballistic missiles that officials were surprised I came, I saw what “everyday life” means under Russian terror. Dnipro’s mayor, Borys Filatov, showed me videos of Russian “double-tap” strikes: the first missile destroys a home, the second arrives fifteen minutes later to kill the firefighters and police who respond. Dnipro is home to one of Europe’s oldest Jewish communities and the largest Jewish center in the world; from the roof of the Menorah Center, after a young boy’s birthday party, I looked out over a skyline scarred by drones. As I left, the mayor embraced me and wept.
Then there was President Zelenskyy, a man I had once called corrupt, mocked, and labeled a Nazi dictator. He let me interview him at Mariinsky Palace for an hour, with two hours’ notice, no vetted questions, and nothing off limits. I asked him about the rumors of his cocaine usage. I asked him how he feels about American podcasters who still launder Russian talking points. And I asked him about his dreadful meeting at the White House last year with President Trump and JD Vance that ended in a screaming match and Zelenskyy being asked to leave. I expected the caricature I had helped draw: a self-interested tinpot dictator in a T-shirt. The man I met answered the hardest questions I could throw at him. Vladimir Putin would never sit for that interview.
Am I a one-off? I don’t think so. Several weeks ago, Senator Lindsey Graham died hours after returning from his own trip to Kyiv. I toured Skyfall, the same drone factory he did, and the founder of the company told me a drone Senator Graham signed, which was originally meant for his Senate office, was instead sent to the frontlines to intercept Russian drones. On the day of his funeral, Congress passed secondary sanctions on Russia. Since my visit, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have pledged to travel to Kyiv, and President Trump and President Zelenskyy held a working session. The people President Trump trusts most are going to see it for themselves. Something is moving in our movement.
So what should a MAGA agenda on Ukraine actually look like? Not endless war, not a blank check — but America First, honestly applied.
First, sign the drone deal — including co-production requirement in the United States. Ninety percent of frontline casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are now caused by drones, and Ukraine builds them better, faster and cheaper than anyone on earth. Let President Trump’s incoming drone czar cut through the remaining red tape. American rearmament should run on Ukrainian battlefield innovation — as a trade, not charity.
Second, send the interceptors. In Maidan Square, a man approached me, holding back tears, and told me: “tell your President to send the fucking missiles.” He meant PAC-2s and PAC-3s — now — and expedited licensed Patriot production so the supply never runs dry. Patriots do not escalate wars. They stop children’s hospitals, homes, and cathedrals from being flattened.
Third, cut the money. Sanctions with teeth start with the financial flows that let Moscow bankroll this war and its military production. And use Russia’s own: roughly €200 billion in frozen Russian state assets sits in Europe. Hand it to Ukraine — every euro of Putin’s money spent on Ukraine’s defense is a dollar American taxpayers never have to send. That includes ourselves, too: American components, including chips from U.S. manufacturers, keep turning up in the Russian weapons falling on Ukrainian cities. Sanctions must be enforced against anyone in that supply chain, no matter whose flag they fly.
Fourth, make Europe pay its share. President Trump was right for decades about European free-riding. The model going forward is simple: Europe funds the fight on its own continent, much of it by buying American weapons, and in return, American workers benefit through the supply chain and American manufacturing.
Finally, make support durable through deals, defense partnerships and sanctions law that outlasts any single administration. Ukraine may be the issue where Americans learn to agree on foreign policy again: the establishment was right about Russia’s brutality, and MAGA is right about how to answer it — through strength, leverage and dealmaking rather than lofty speeches and blank checks.
At the end of my trip, my visit to Ukraine became even more personal. One night in Kyiv, one of Ukraine’s top archivists stayed up all night reviewing records after I mentioned that my great grandparents may have immigrated to the US from Kyiv. To my surprise, the archivist found my own truth: my family came from Vinnytsia. What does this mean? It means I am a Ukrainian American. The people I spent years disparaging embraced me anyway, and I found out I was badmouthing my own ancestors. I discovered this on live television in Ukraine, so you can imagine how embarrassed I was. I guess some would say I ate a slice of humble pie.
People say I was brave to admit I was wrong. It is embarrassing, but it is nothing compared to the courage of the Ukrainian people who will stop at nothing to ensure their country never again becomes a Russian vassal. They want independence. They want democracy. They want what our founders wanted. They just need the tools to finish the job.
In the end, Ukraine will stand as a strong and strategic ally of the United States. Skeptics claim victory is impossible, yet American history is filled with underdogs who defied the odds. The same doubts were voiced during the American Revolution—until we won. Ukrainian history will one day tell the same story.
I will be going back.
Laura Loomer is an investigative journalist and the host of Loomer Unleashed.
The first air raid siren of my life went off two days after I arrived in Kyiv. I had heard that sound in a thousand video clips, but it hits different firsthand — when people walking down the street quietly check Telegram to diagnose the missile’s origin and likely target. One day before I arrived, a Russian strike on Kyiv killed six people. Another killed more than ten while I was there.
I owe my readers the truth: I was wrong about Ukraine.
For years, I used my platform to ignore the brutality of Russia’s invasion, to minimize the existential fight of the Ukrainian people, and to repeat claims that I now know — because I traveled to Ukraine and went on a fact finding expedition myself — were manufactured in Moscow. In 2021, I wrote several articles for RT, the Kremlin’s “news” network. I was, as I told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders to their faces when I was recently in Ukraine, bamboozled by Russian propaganda. Regrettably, I passed that twisted messaging along to millions of Americans who trusted me, and although I was never paid by RT, I realize how I was exploited to push an ulterior narrative.
How does that happen to someone whose entire brand is built on reporting uncomfortable truths?
The honest answer is that Russian propaganda is engineered for people exactly like me. I built my career on the conviction that the institutions lying to Americans — the media, the intelligence agencies, the foreign policy establishment — deserved no benefit of the doubt. I was deplatformed, debarked, mocked and written off for saying so. For years, I was denied the ability to have a digital platform by the Big Tech social media companies and their enablers in the Democrat Party who cheered as my voice was silenced. I was filled with rage and felt a sense of relief when I was approached by RT after the 2020 Presidential election and offered a byline on their website to “let my voice be heard”.
After Crimea was seized during the Obama-Biden administration, after the full-scale invasion came under Biden, and after twenty years of the foreign policy establishment being wrong without ever paying a price, my instinct, the MAGA instinct, was that anything the establishment supported must be a lie. They never had to convince me to love Russia. They only had to feed my distrust of the people telling me to support Ukraine. And it worked, because I was filled with rage for the establishment and my rage was capitalized.
Over the last year, I’ve watched in frustration as the Woke Reich has spread Russian propaganda as a way to undermine the Trump administration and divide the MAGA base. After witnessing several Woke Reich podcasters travel to Russia where they engaged in promoting Russian narratives, I decided to travel to Ukraine to try to verify the claims I had spent years repeating, and I promised my audience I would report back whatever I found — even if the claims didn’t hold up. They did not.
On my first day, I visited a mass grave beside St. Andrew’s Church in Bucha, an upscale suburb of Kyiv, filled with civilians murdered by Russian forces. The photographs of the dead in shallow, hastily dug pits were indistinguishable from the black-and-white images of Nazi and Soviet atrocities in history books. Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk told me residents were not even allowed to put the dead in body bags. Bullet holes still riddle the fences and the exterior of the church. A Ukrainian special operator on our security detail had helped clear Bucha after the occupation. Looking at the photos, he quietly teared up and said, “I know these houses.” That was the moment the last of my doubts died. Russian propaganda cannot fake a soldier crying over houses he knows by name.
At the Ukrainian military intelligence’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, I spoke with three Ukrainian soldiers exchanged for Russian captives. Each had been starved, beaten, electrocuted — and worse. One soldier’s life was saved by a Russian surgeon who refused to use anesthesia, and then burned a large “Z,” the symbol of the invasion, beside the surgical scar to permanently brand the Ukrainian.
I visited the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity, founded in 1051, roughly a century before Moscow first appears in the historical record. Weeks earlier, a Russian Shahed drone was fired into it, nearly destroying statues of Jesus and Mary.
In Dnipro and Kharkiv, cities so frequently targeted by ballistic missiles that officials were surprised I came, I saw what “everyday life” means under Russian terror. Dnipro’s mayor, Borys Filatov, showed me videos of Russian “double-tap” strikes: the first missile destroys a home, the second arrives fifteen minutes later to kill the firefighters and police who respond. Dnipro is home to one of Europe’s oldest Jewish communities and the largest Jewish center in the world; from the roof of the Menorah Center, after a young boy’s birthday party, I looked out over a skyline scarred by drones. As I left, the mayor embraced me and wept.
Then there was President Zelenskyy, a man I had once called corrupt, mocked, and labeled a Nazi dictator. He let me interview him at Mariinsky Palace for an hour, with two hours’ notice, no vetted questions, and nothing off limits. I asked him about the rumors of his cocaine usage. I asked him how he feels about American podcasters who still launder Russian talking points. And I asked him about his dreadful meeting at the White House last year with President Trump and JD Vance that ended in a screaming match and Zelenskyy being asked to leave. I expected the caricature I had helped draw: a self-interested tinpot dictator in a T-shirt. The man I met answered the hardest questions I could throw at him. Vladimir Putin would never sit for that interview.
Am I a one-off? I don’t think so. Several weeks ago, Senator Lindsey Graham died hours after returning from his own trip to Kyiv. I toured Skyfall, the same drone factory he did, and the founder of the company told me a drone Senator Graham signed, which was originally meant for his Senate office, was instead sent to the frontlines to intercept Russian drones. On the day of his funeral, Congress passed secondary sanctions on Russia. Since my visit, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have pledged to travel to Kyiv, and President Trump and President Zelenskyy held a working session. The people President Trump trusts most are going to see it for themselves. Something is moving in our movement.
So what should a MAGA agenda on Ukraine actually look like? Not endless war, not a blank check — but America First, honestly applied.
First, sign the drone deal — including co-production requirement in the United States. Ninety percent of frontline casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are now caused by drones, and Ukraine builds them better, faster and cheaper than anyone on earth. Let President Trump’s incoming drone czar cut through the remaining red tape. American rearmament should run on Ukrainian battlefield innovation — as a trade, not charity.
Second, send the interceptors. In Maidan Square, a man approached me, holding back tears, and told me: “tell your President to send the fucking missiles.” He meant PAC-2s and PAC-3s — now — and expedited licensed Patriot production so the supply never runs dry. Patriots do not escalate wars. They stop children’s hospitals, homes, and cathedrals from being flattened.
Third, cut the money. Sanctions with teeth start with the financial flows that let Moscow bankroll this war and its military production. And use Russia’s own: roughly €200 billion in frozen Russian state assets sits in Europe. Hand it to Ukraine — every euro of Putin’s money spent on Ukraine’s defense is a dollar American taxpayers never have to send. That includes ourselves, too: American components, including chips from U.S. manufacturers, keep turning up in the Russian weapons falling on Ukrainian cities. Sanctions must be enforced against anyone in that supply chain, no matter whose flag they fly.
Fourth, make Europe pay its share. President Trump was right for decades about European free-riding. The model going forward is simple: Europe funds the fight on its own continent, much of it by buying American weapons, and in return, American workers benefit through the supply chain and American manufacturing.
Finally, make support durable through deals, defense partnerships and sanctions law that outlasts any single administration. Ukraine may be the issue where Americans learn to agree on foreign policy again: the establishment was right about Russia’s brutality, and MAGA is right about how to answer it — through strength, leverage and dealmaking rather than lofty speeches and blank checks.
At the end of my trip, my visit to Ukraine became even more personal. One night in Kyiv, one of Ukraine’s top archivists stayed up all night reviewing records after I mentioned that my great grandparents may have immigrated to the US from Kyiv. To my surprise, the archivist found my own truth: my family came from Vinnytsia. What does this mean? It means I am a Ukrainian American. The people I spent years disparaging embraced me anyway, and I found out I was badmouthing my own ancestors. I discovered this on live television in Ukraine, so you can imagine how embarrassed I was. I guess some would say I ate a slice of humble pie.
People say I was brave to admit I was wrong. It is embarrassing, but it is nothing compared to the courage of the Ukrainian people who will stop at nothing to ensure their country never again becomes a Russian vassal. They want independence. They want democracy. They want what our founders wanted. They just need the tools to finish the job.
In the end, Ukraine will stand as a strong and strategic ally of the United States. Skeptics claim victory is impossible, yet American history is filled with underdogs who defied the odds. The same doubts were voiced during the American Revolution—until we won. Ukrainian history will one day tell the same story.
I will be going back.