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After being ‘bamboozled by Russian propaganda,’ Laura Loomer says she’s all in for Ukraine

(CNN) — For years, Laura Loomer’s unflinching support for President Donald Trump was matched only by her fervent opposition to the US assisting Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The far-right figure has accused Ukrainian soldiers of committing war crimes and President Volodymyr Zelensky of faking his Jewish faith. She once encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to seize the entire country.

Yet, on Friday, Loomer released an exceedingly friendly 45-minute interview with Zelensky recorded in Kyiv where she praised the country’s drone tactics, acknowledged she spread falsehoods about the war and expressed regrets for amplifying narratives that benefited Russia.

“I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda,” she told Zelensky, “and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine.”

The admission marked a stunning reversal by one of Trump’s most loyal allies — one the president appeared to immediately embrace. On Thursday, Trump shared a promotional clip of the interview on Truth Social and wrote: “Very good!!!”

Two senior administration officials told CNN that the White House was unaware that Loomer had made the trip to war-torn Ukraine — a 30-hour journey that she said included a lengthy train ride from Poland to Kyiv because of airspace restrictions. Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to questions from CNN about her appearance there.

Her visit nevertheless presented a striking reminder of the unconventional currents that sometimes shape Trump’s foreign policy orbit. Images of her appearing alongside Zelensky emerged the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in the Philippines. Loomer received a commitment from Zelensky to sign a peace deal with Russia at the White House or Trump’s Palm Beach estate; Rubio, meanwhile, acknowledged there’s been little movement toward an agreement.

Zelensky is set to meet Trump at the White House on Tuesday, a White House official told CNN. Zelensky said earlier this week that he’d spoken to Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. “It was a good, important conversation on how to reinvigorate diplomacy and bring peace closer,” he posted on X.

Until recently, Loomer — who spends a significant amount of her time identifying and criticizing allegedly disloyal employees within the Trump administration — seemed unlikely ever to express sympathies for the Ukrainian people. In addition to using her massive digital platform to rally MAGA against the country in the war, she also previously wrote a series of op-eds for RT, the Kremlin-funded international television network.

A person in Kyiv with knowledge of how the Zelensky interview was arranged told CNN that there was a “considerable effort” in recent weeks to change Loomer’s worldview.

Reached briefly by phone as she toured the wreckage from a Russian airstrike, Loomer said she had a positive experience speaking with Zelensky. In subsequent messages with CNN, she did not elaborate on how the trip was arranged.

In her conversation with Zelensky, Loomer distanced herself from past statements accusing him of supporting neo-Nazi militias and praised the country’s new law criminalizing antisemitism. During her visit, she also met a prominent Ukrainian rabbi, Moshe Reuven Azman.

Loomer’s conversion drew a range of reactions, including deep skepticism from liberals and anti-Trump Republicans on X, some of whom questioned whether her change in view was genuine or financial. Loomer told the news outlet Puck that she paid for her own plane ticket but declined to say how other arrangements were covered, like security and her train ticket.

“The government of Ukraine did not pay for me to go, if that’s what you’re asking,” she told Puck.

Tim Pool, another far-right commentator and outspoken Ukraine critic, appeared to mock Loomer on X by posting his own change-of-heart on the war that he later seemed to reveal was insincere.

However, Zelensky’s inner circle was pleased with the initial reaction to Loomer’s appearance, the Kyiv source said, and they are optimistic she can now be an influential voice of support for Ukraine given her credibility with the president and many of his supporters. During the interview, Zelensky praised Trump and was receptive to Loomer’s overtures on how to win over MAGA, though he declined to say who he thought was better between President Joe Biden and the current office holder.

“History will answer,” he said, before naming Abraham Lincoln as the country’s best leader.

Loomer’s revisiting her longstanding opposition to Ukraine follows an escalating feud with Tucker Carlson over his opposition to Trump’s war with Iran. Like Loomer, Carlson has regularly shared Russian talking points while opposing US support for Ukraine’s defense.

But Loomer has grown increasingly suspicious of Carlson’s motivations, exposing a deep ideological fracture within the MAGA movement over foreign policy. Amid her travels to Ukraine, Loomer took aim at Carlson. At one point, she ate at a McDonalds still operating amid the rubble caused by airstrikes, a gesture intended to evoke Carlson’s controversial visit to Moscow two years ago, when he interviewed Putin, praised it as “nicer than any” US city and ate a Russian knock-off of the golden arches. McDonalds pulled out of the country in 2022 shortly after it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The emerging divisions within Trump’s base over the war comes amid intensifying air strikes between Ukraine and Russia. June marked the deadliest month for Ukraine civilians in more than four years, the United Nation’s recently reported, while drone attacks on Russian infrastructure and its warships have led to mounting casualties and presented new challenges for Putin.

Congress is weighing punishing Moscow with further sanctions in a bill designed to honor the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime supporter of Ukraine in its war against Russia. Trump has expressed a willingness to sign the bill if it also includes sanctions against Iran.

Asked about the sanctions legislation, Zelensky told Loomer that Trump “exactly understood who really doesn’t want to stop the war.”

“He understood that we really want peace,” Zelensky said.

The-CNN-Wire
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If another advanced civilization lived on Earth before us, would we know?

(CNN) — When astrobiologist Adam Frank walked into the office of NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, he had what he believed was the weirdest question: do aliens experience climate change? It took just moments for Schmidt to out-weird him.Frank, a University of Rochester professor who looks for signs of life in the universe, was digging into whether advanced civilizations would inevitably trigger climate shifts, just as humans are doing now. He was looking at other planets, he told Schmidt that day back in 2017, “because, of course, we know that there have been no other civilizations on Earth.”Schmidt immediately cut him off. “How do you know that?” he asked.It was a record scratch moment, Frank said, and it started the two scientists off on an investigation. If an advanced civilization had lived on Earth millions of years ago, powered themselves with energy and wiped themselves out, would we know? Would they have left traces of their presence etched into the record of our planet?They called the idea the “Silurian hypothesis” — after a fictional advanced race of reptiles in the TV show “Doctor Who” — and published a paper on it in 2018.It is a mind-bending idea that not only looks deep into the Earth’s past but also far into its future, as humans change the climate swiftly and dramatically by burning fossil fuels. “It is a thought experiment, but one that exposes our potential vulnerability globally,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, who was not involved in the research.The Silurean hypothesis opens big questions about the trajectory of advanced civilizations and whether all those that harness energy on a global scale are destined to burn out, or whether there’s a chance to live sustainably and survive for millions of years.“These questions are all relevant to exactly the moment that we’re in,” said Frank. “We are pushing the planet into a new climate regime … we know this is true, right? And yet we’re not doing anything about it.”The reason Schmidt had been mulling the possibility of previous advanced civilizations on Earth was an event deep in the past.Around 55 million years ago, the planet’s climate signals went haywire. Global temperatures spiked up to 15 degrees Fahrenheit and ecosystems collapsed, as huge amounts of planet-heating carbon were injected into the atmosphere.This period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and first noted in the 1990s, may have been the result of an enormous volcanic eruption, or maybe a sudden release of methane. But exactly why it happened is still something of a mystery. What intrigued Schmidt were the similarities to what’s happening now as humans push up temperatures and drive extinctions.And it’s not the only unexplained change deep in the planet’s past that echoes our present, other periods have seen oceans starved of oxygen and sharp hikes in temperature.The likelihood is these are natural climate events, but what if they weren’t? How would we know? In their report, Frank and Schmidt go through the chain of possible evidence that might exist in support of a past advanced civilization.Today, only around 1% of the Earth’s surface is urbanized and it wouldn’t take long for what we’ve built to be erased. The further back in time a hypothetical civilization existed, the harder it would be to find direct evidence, like objects.Over millions of years, the planet is resculpted as tectonic plates shift, volcanoes erupt and land erodes. The Earth’s oldest large-scale stretch of land is the Negev Desert in southern Israel, at around 1.8 million years old.Surface features may not provide much evidence, so the scientists looked at fossils. A vanishingly small fraction of animal species is fossilized, however, and even fewer are ever found. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for about 180 million years, but only a few thousand near-complete fossils have been discovered.It might be easy to miss a civilization that only existed for 100,000 years, a mere blip in the 400-million-year-old history of complex life on the planet.The researchers then considered traces left by chemical changes. Think of the Grand Canyon, Frank said, where you can see line after line representing different ages of the Earth. “Every one of those strata is ground up rock that keeps a memory of what the chemistry of the Earth was like then.” If a previous civilization had altered the planet’s chemistry — as humans have done by releasing vast amounts of carbon pollution — there might be a record.The scientists also considered what other evidence humans might leave behind after our civilization has ended, like the vast amounts of plastics as well as artificial hormones for agriculture and persistent chemicals, which do not break down in the environment. These might all show up in future sediments, many millions of years from now. As might the heavy metals used in electronics.The point of the paper wasn’t to establish whether the Silurian hypothesis is correct, Frank said. Instead, it was “to say here’s the things you’d want to look for in a much more high-resolution way in order to see whether or not there was ever a civilization before us.”Both Frank and Schmidt are in the strange position of having written a study about a theory neither believes in — they just say we cannot yet rule it out.No one appears to have picked up the call for a deeper investigation in the years since, but some scientists have raised questions.Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist, paleontologist and emeritus professor at the University of Leicester in the UK, said the Silurian hypothesis is “wonderful and deeply thought-provoking idea.” But Schmidt and Frank underestimated just how much modern humans have transformed the planet, as well as “the effectiveness of the fossilization process and how good it is at preserving a history of what has happened on our planet,” he said.We can’t rule out intelligent pre-human societies, “dinosaurs that could sing complex arias, say, or Jurassic ammonites that could compose poetry,” said Zalasiewicz, who co-wrote the 2025 book “Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy”. But as soon cities are built, metals are smelted, plastics are made and discarded — these will leave a clear footprint, he said.Zalasiewicz is comfortable ruling out the prior existence of the kind of advanced civilization we live in today — “energy-guzzling, manipulative, constructional, and producing waste in colossal quantities.”And that’s the beauty of science, Frank said. “You publish a paper, it’s like, ‘Woo, this is great,’ and then somebody comes along and says, you’re wrong.” Someone else may find something that points in a different direction, and eventually, as research accumulates, a consensus will be formed.For now, perhaps the most important reason to explore this hypothesis is the important questions it poses about the longevity of advanced technological civilizations like ours.We’re smart enough to develop technology, but we might not be smart enough to figure out how to deal with its climate-shifting consequences, Frank said. “Are we an experiment that the planet has run, which is going to fail?”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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