Laura Loomer met with Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday after years of dismissing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then said her first air raid in the country changed how she saw the war. Posting on X, she wrote that sirens were blaring and that what she had once said about not caring was not very nice.
The meeting matters now because Loomer has long been a sharp critic of U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense and had amplified claims that cast Ukraine in deeply hostile terms. She had called Ukraine “a country full of Nazi apologists” and said it was “led by a Jihadi apologist,” making her public shift a striking break from the position that had defined her politics for years.
Zelenskyy’s office had already signaled the encounter earlier in the week, writing on Tuesday that it was important that Laura Loomer was in Ukraine and seeing things with her own eyes. On Thursday, the office thanked her for coming and said it took courage to visit Ukraine and not be deterred by Russian propaganda or air raid sirens. The direct language underscored that the visit was not just symbolic; it was meant to show that exposure to the war could still change minds, even among some of its loudest skeptics.
Dmytro Lytvyn said no Ukrainian government institution organized the visit, and that Zelenskyy’s office first learned Laura Loomer was in Ukraine through social media. That detail leaves the most basic question from the meeting unanswered: what, if anything, came out of the conversation between Loomer and Zelensky. The visit also followed Loomer’s stop at the Dormition Cathedral of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, which came under Russian attack last month and suffered significant interior and exterior damage, according to UNESCO.
For Loomer, the break is hard to miss. After years of minimizing the invasion to nearly two million followers and ridiculing support for Ukraine, she emerged from one air raid saying, in effect, that the war looked different once she had lived through it. What she does with that realization in Washington now matters more than the photographs from Thursday.
