Why MAGA is turning on Russia

Last month Ukrainian drones struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, the first direct link between the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and proof of a secret arms pipeline between Moscow and Tehran. The strike came amid an extraordinary shift inside MAGA world. Pro-Trump influencer Laura Loomer, who once called Zelenskyy an authoritarian and said Ukraine needed to be "denazified", has spent months touring Kyiv and doing friendly interviews with the Ukrainian president. Now Zelenskyy is using his new MAGA allies to argue Ukraine can help Trump too, which is good timing because the US has nearly run out of missiles. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

• 0:20Matt Bevan?

  Yeah, I mean, affordable housing seems like a pretty simple concept, right? But it is a lot more complicated than that.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Join me for ABC News Daily. Find us on ABC Listen.

• 0:35Matt Bevan?

  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people. I personally find fishing extremely boring.

• 0:46Matt Bevan?

  But sometimes interesting things do happen.

• 0:50Matt Bevan?

  For example, in 2024, a group of fishermen were somewhat surprised when a cluster of cruise missiles flew right over their heads.

• 1:06Matt Bevan?

  Those missiles were at the start of a very long journey.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  They've shot cruise missiles from a ship in the Caspian Sea without warning.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  So we've seen Russian warships in the Caspian Sea firing long range missiles at Ukraine.

• 1:17Matt Bevan?

  Now, the Caspian Sea is nowhere near Ukraine. For a Russian warship to hit a Ukrainian target from the Caspian Sea, it's almost a thousand kilometre shot. It would be much easier to fire at Ukraine from the Black Sea, but the problem with that is that the Black Sea is no longer safe for Russian boats.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  This is the moment Ukrainian sea drones strike and sink a Russian warship on patrol in the Black Sea.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  That shows to Putin that he's not safe in the Black Sea at the moment.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Kiev says it's downed more than 80 Russian ships in the strategic waters.

• 1:56Matt Bevan?

  For Russian ships, the Caspian Sea is much safer to access than the Black Sea. The only connection between the Caspian Sea and the open ocean is through a large Russian canal system, which Russia can use to move naval vessels in and out. None of the other four countries which border the Caspian Sea, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, have a canal system, meaning that the Russian Navy can essentially dominate that waterway, totally safe from Ukrainian attack. Or at least, that was the case until recently.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Ukrainian drones hit the sea base of the Caspian Flotilla of the Russian Navy. Ukraine continued its assault as its armed forces struck a Russian warship in the Caspian Sea.

• 2:43Matt Bevan?

  Ukraine has been launching these attacks on Russian vessels for a little while, but in late July this year, they did something a little bit different. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming a Ukrainian attack on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea. Now, this attack on an Iranian ship is strange because last time I checked, Ukraine is at war with Russia and Russia and Iran are different countries.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Kiev's weekend drone attack on an Iranian ship and Russian targets in the Caspian Sea has marked the first direct link between the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

• 3:21Matt Bevan?

  Ukraine says that Russia and Iran have been supplying each other with weapons using cargo ships on the Caspian Sea, assisting each other in their wars against Ukraine, the US and Israel.

• 3:32Speaker 06

  If Iran, from the first year of the war, gave new technology to Russia, it was Chekhianov drones, they gave thousands of these drones first year of the war, we have to be honest, Iranians and North Koreans already attacked us.

• 3:51Matt Bevan?

  Now, this decision by Zelensky to attack Iranian shipping is very interesting because it coincided with a sudden increase in support for Ukraine from some unexpected places.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  There's been a significant shift towards Ukraine in some parts of the MAGA world.

• 4:08Matt Bevan?

  This is a change of heart among a group of people who previously did not like Ukraine at all.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president and emerging dictator.

• 4:17Matt Bevan?

  This, for example, is what MAGA influencer Laura Luma used to say about Ukraine.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  He regularly likes to call Putin an authoritarian, when he himself is no better and is in fact in many ways even worse.

• 4:30Matt Bevan?

  And yet this is Laura Luma in July this year, being very polite indeed when she sat down to chat with Zelensky in Kiev.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  I really appreciate you taking time to meet with me. Thank you so much. I've come to realise that I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda.

• 4:54Matt Bevan?

  Having looked closely at this, I think what's happening here is Ukraine is taking advantage of a unique moment in the history of their war with Russia, a moment that might change everything. It's a strange story involving a factional war inside the MAGA movement and Russian influence operations, and it will show just how important it is to seize an opportunity when it's presented to you. I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

• 5:34Matt Bevan?

  Now, I'm going to talk about Laura Luma a bit here, and before I do that, I want to make it clear that she's got some pretty abhorrent views. For one, she describes herself as a proud Islamophobe, but also says...

• 5:48Speaker 04

  I don't believe that Islamophobia is real. I believe Islamophobia is a hoax.

• 5:52Matt Bevan?

  I'm not going to go into all the terrible things that she said about Islam, but put it this way, by 2018, she had apparently said enough of them to get herself banned from Twitter for life.

• 6:05Matt Bevan?

  In response, she chained herself to the front door of Twitter headquarters and called out its CEO, Jack Dorsey.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  What Jack Dorsey is doing with his egregious double standard by allowing for verified hateful liberals and leftists and jihadis to spew their hate and violence on social media while banning a Jewish conservative journalist like myself and millions of conservatives all across the country?

• 6:32Speaker 04

  He's trying to stifle speech in this country.

• 6:34Matt Bevan?

  After continuing to pull terrible stunts and say terrible things, Luma was banned from other platforms too, or to use the popular term of the time, she was deplatformed. In 2020, she ran for Congress in Florida and lost. Her phone kind of just stopped ringing at that point. Nobody was interested in working with her. But then someone else got kicked off social media too.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  Twitter and Facebook deleted President Donald Trump's extensive social media profiles after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol.

• 7:09Matt Bevan?

  The US president was deplatformed after the January 6th attack.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  This censorship is unlawful, it's unconstitutional and it's completely un-American.

• 7:19Matt Bevan?

  Trump left the White House unsure of what would happen to him next.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  Goodbye, we love you, we will be back in some form.

• 7:28Matt Bevan?

  And suddenly Laura Luma started getting calls again. Well, she got at least one call from the Russian propaganda network, RT.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  When I was deplatformed because the big tech social media companies wouldn't allow me to have access to social media, RT started reaching out to me and asking me to come on their show and they said, why don't you have a byline on RT and you can even write for RT? I never took any money from RT, I was never paid, but I felt, wow.

• 7:53Matt Bevan?

  She started writing articles for them and appearing on air as a pundit.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  We will be back in some form, President Trump said there. I guess Laura, the question is, what does that actually mean?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Well, discussions about a potential third party. If there's one person in the country who's capable of, you know, crushing the Republican Party, it would be Donald Trump.

• 8:13Matt Bevan?

  And it appears that the attention she got from the Russian propaganda network did the trick because within a week, she was posting on her Telegram channel that Putin cares about protecting free speech more than the Democrat Party. Their media is better than the American media when it comes to reporting on censorship, and that big tech is rigging elections more than Russia ever did.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  How crazy is it that my own government won't allow me to, they're not fighting for me when the big tech social media companies are deplatforming my campaign, but RT will let me talk about these issues, right? And then you, you, you start to get kind of goaded into saying things like, oh, well, maybe they care more about free speech than my own country.

• 8:56Matt Bevan?

  RT wouldn't be around forever though. When Putin ordered the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they were sanctioned by the US government and had to shut down their American operations. But that didn't stop Laura Luma from parroting Putin's argument that Ukraine was a fascist state and needed to be denazified.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  When I hear Putin say we need to denazify Ukraine, I say, wow, yeah, actually, that that is pretty, that is pretty accurate.

• 9:22Matt Bevan?

  But she wasn't alone. Heaps of right wing influencers started to argue that President Joe Biden should give up US military support for Ukraine because it was too expensive.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  We're giving $200 billion to Ukraine. We've paid enough in the wars in Europe. We're not a European power. The US is weaker, measurably weaker because of our support for Ukraine in this war. I'm very much a person that from the very beginning has said F Ukraine. Ukraine is the greatest threat to this nation and to the world. We should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologise to Russia.

• 10:00Matt Bevan?

  In an effort to assist some of these influencers, RT secretly funded a company in the US called Tenet Media, funneling $10 million into the pockets of various American right wing influencers like Tim Poole and Benny Johnson, who had made anti Ukrainian statements.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Ukraine is the enemy of this country. Ukraine is our enemy. Ukraine, with America's help, has become a terror state. Ukraine is precisely the

• 10:27Matt Bevan?

  Kind of country that we swore to fight against during the global war on terror. The influencers apparently didn't know that the money was coming from Russia, but cash is cash. And the more cash you have, the further you can spread your anti-Ukraine messages. We did a whole episode on this story a couple of years ago. Quite a crazy story. The thing that wasn't clear at the time back in 2022, but is extremely clear now, is that these right wing influencers, people like Laura Luma, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Tim Poole, they're not always in agreement with each other.

• 11:05Matt Bevan?

  I mean, they could definitely agree on a few things. They were united around the idea that Joe Biden should stop funding Ukraine. When the October 7 terrorist attack happened in Israel in 2023, they were also basically unified around the idea that Joe Biden was doing a bad job of handling the war in Gaza. They all thought the solution to both problems, Ukraine and Gaza, was to elect Donald Trump as president again.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  The moment Trump becomes president, he's on the phone with Putin, he's on the phone with Zelensky, and he says, stop fighting, we're going to talk. The fighting stops, the war's over.

• 11:42Speaker 07

  If I were president, it would have never started. Look at what's going on in the Middle East. This would have never happened.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  October 7th never would have happened if Donald Trump was president.

• 11:52Matt Bevan?

  But the one thing they didn't agree on was America's relationship with Israel. And it was this particular divide that right wing influencer Tim Poole identified early on.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  We're certainly seeing conflict on the right. Personalities that were typically more in support of Donald Trump, now feuding with other conservatives and people who are pro-Israel. And boy, is it all just breaking down in rather shocking ways.

• 12:18Matt Bevan?

  Tim Poole identified that there is a clear, very pro-Israel faction, and a separate faction of people who are not exactly anti-Israel, but more isolationist. They're critical of America entering into any foreign wars and handing over huge amounts of money to foreign countries, including Israel. Now Laura Luma, who is on the very pro-Israel side, describes the guys on the other side, people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, like this.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  All of these woke Reich neo-Nazis colluding with the radical left jihadist Muslims and going around and chasing Jews and evangelicals on the streets of America with drones. I know it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but this is where we're headed.

• 13:02Matt Bevan?

  Yeah, so obviously, she's not a huge fan of the people that she calls the woke Reich, and openly calls them neo-Nazis. In most cases, these people are not neo-Nazis. So for our purposes, we're going to refer to this group as the isolationist faction. So Luma is the pro-Israel faction, and her opponents are the isolationist faction. Now, the divide between the factions was mostly hidden before Trump took office again. It became more and more obvious through 2025, and eventually it spilled right into the open when Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in attacking Iran in February 2026.

• 13:43Matt Bevan?

  The pro-Israel faction were keen to defend Israel and back this war, so their takes went like this.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  President Trump really took a decisive action that needed to be taken now in this moment because he's saving millions of lives.

• 13:57Speaker 06

  Certainly, there are many people that are in favor of Donald Trump striking this country, taking out their leadership. President Trump is the most courageous commander in chief in modern American history. There is no question about this. We have an Islamist Nazi enemy that wants to build nuclear weapons to blow us off the face of the earth. I understand the Jew haters who want you to believe that this is Israel's war. And to them, I say, go to hell.

• 14:27Matt Bevan?

  While the isolationist faction saw this move as the US entering into yet another foreign conflict, and their takes went like this. Donald Trump has very clearly betrayed the American people. He is very clearly not the commander of the armed forces. Bibi Netanyahu is.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  Everybody knows what this is. Everybody knows they're fighting for Israel. It's such a betrayal. You just look at Trump and you're filled with disgust because you are a demonic force. You are a liar, you are diabolical, you are a traitor.

• 14:59Matt Bevan?

  The split is pretty subtle. I hope you picked it up there. Now, both sides started calling each other very defamatory racist and often anti-Semitic names, and accusing each other of being traitors, but I'll spare you that for now. But the key thing that Laura Luma noticed was that RT, the network that had rescued her from obscurity back in 2021, was supporting the other side of her factional fight.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  And they're all propping up these clips. They take clips of Joe Kent, they take clips of Candace Owens, they take clips of Megyn Kelly, they take clips of Tucker Carlson.

• 15:34Matt Bevan?

  RT was using its accounts on YouTube, X and Telegram to boost the opinions of those in the isolationist faction, the same way that they boosted Laura Luma's opinions in the past. Now, there's no secret why this was happening. Russia is an ally of Iran, and the isolationists were against the US military attacking Iran. So their views aligned with Russia's. Laura Luma was confused.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Oh, wow, Russia today really seems to be like transforming their media operation into a Clipper account for the woke Reich.

• 16:07Matt Bevan?

  But here's the thing, RT hasn't changed its position at all. Since it was founded, the network has been a vehicle for promoting criticism of the US government. The difference is Laura Luma is now kind of part of the US government.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  The president called me after the strikes. We talked for about 20 minutes on the phone. And it's really interesting, you know, just chatting about several things.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Hi Laura, boy, you are something. What spirit you have. Laura, Laura Luma, thank you, honey, for being here, I appreciate it.

• 16:39Matt Bevan?

  Now, Luma started doing some soul searching, and she realized that Russia was an ally of Iran. And perhaps getting help from a Russian propaganda network that was allied with Israel's mortal enemy might be a bit problematic.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Because then I started to see Putin entertain the idea of selling nuclear weapons, selling missiles and selling drones to the Iranians for the sake of attacking the United States of America. That was enough for me, honestly, that was enough.

• 17:07Matt Bevan?

  She was having a bit of an identity crisis and started to reconsider everything, including her position on Ukraine.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  I thought, what are people going to think of me? I've been, I've been so anti-Ukraine for so long, and I have parroted these talking points, thinking that I was, you know, saying the right thing and not recognizing how, you know, as a conservative or as a Trump supporter or just as an American citizen, how I was being emotionally manipulated by propaganda online. And so I felt a little embarrassed.

• 17:39Matt Bevan?

  Then she accepted an invitation from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to visit his country.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  How was the trip to Kyiv, by the way? The trip? It was very long. It was a good experience. I got to see a lot of the destruction when I was coming in. So it gave me a good ideas to, you know, how much of Ukraine has been destroyed by Russian missiles and drones.

• 18:07Matt Bevan?

  Okay, the question I posed at the start was, how did Laura Luma go from calling Zelensky an authoritarian who commands a Nazi militia to talking to him about her lovely train trip to Kyiv? Well, the reason I told you this story in full is so that you'd see what happened here and what didn't happen. What happened was Laura Luma found herself in a MAGA factional fight over the war in Iran. Russia supported her isolationist opponents, so she decided to support Russia's opponents. I want to be clear, it's not like she finally saw the light. Ukraine didn't conduct a secret influence operation to get her to take their side either.

• 18:48Matt Bevan?

  This is pretty much just petty factional stuff. The interesting element is Zelensky saw this change of heart as an opportunity to help the situation in Ukraine. The war in the Middle East is occupying the majority of the Trump administration's attention, and they're losing the support of a lot of their traditional allies. If Ukraine can make it seem like they're on the Trump administration's side of that war, then it could lead to a rapid shift in sentiment, which could help their own war effort. For Laura Luma, it only took a couple of months for her opinion to totally change.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  I don't think that the Ukrainians and your office does a very good job at messaging how supporting Ukraine could be America first, or how it's beneficial for America's national security.

• 19:35Matt Bevan?

  And while she was in Ukraine, Luma explicitly linked the Ukrainian and Iranian wars by talking about Russia's involvement in both of them.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Russia is providing Iran explosives materials, and they're interchanging and sending each other weapons and materials for weapons, especially Shahed drones being supplied by Iran to Russia so that they can attack and kill Ukrainians. And then simultaneously, Russia's sending them, you know, basically the explosive materials and the combustible materials so that they can make bombs and explosives to murder US soldiers that are currently fighting in the war with Iran.

• 20:14Matt Bevan?

  Now, President Zelensky has been trying to make that point about Russia and Iran sending weapons to each other even more clear by attacking those ships in the Caspian Sea, which make that exchange of materials possible.

• 20:30Matt Bevan?

  President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming. A Ukrainian attack on an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea. He also emphasised the fact that they are willing to help the US materially in the war in Iran, while other US allies in Europe refuse. He's reported sending the US evidence they collected that Russia has been taking satellite pictures of US army bases in the Middle East and sharing them with Iran to assist with Iran's drone and missile targeting.

• 21:00Matt Bevan?

  And with Luma's help, Ukraine has been promoting its ability to assist the US with drone production.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  I think that Ukraine is really leading the way in a lot of the drone innovation and a lot of the drone technology. If you look at the numbers, the United States is on track to produce about 300,000 drones this year and Ukraine is about to produce 8 million.

• 21:20Matt Bevan?

  The messages Luma and Zelensky are sending about Ukraine's military usefulness is starting to have an effect on other MAGA influencers too.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  I'm not a big fan of Ukraine. I think their government is filthy. But I will stress this, we've got an escalating war here. There is no argument against US victory.

• 21:38Matt Bevan?

  Luma says she spoke multiple times on the phone to Trump while she was in Ukraine, and reportedly it's starting to have an effect.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  We are told that Donald Trump has kind of changed his tune in the last few weeks and over the last month or so, as Ukraine has started to shift the balance of things in the war.

• 22:00Matt Bevan?

  The question is, will any of this work? Well, the conflict in Ukraine has been basically frozen in place for four years. Neither side has moved much. The Trump administration's early attempts to get both Ukraine and Russia to sign a peace agreement, where both sides just keep the territory they currently occupy and call it a day, have failed. Many European countries are still providing finance and weapons to Ukraine, but direct American support was cut off when Trump took office and has not restarted. Meanwhile, on the ground in Ukraine, the domestic situation for Zelensky is difficult.

• 22:43Matt Bevan?

  He's been facing protests in the street over his decision to sack his young innovative Defence Minister Mikhail Fedorov back in June, because of an internal conflict between Fedorov and the Chief of the Armed Forces. Civilian casualties have been increasing throughout 2026, with nearly 300 killed in June alone by Russian attacks. Ukraine is not a passive victim here either. All year, they've been sending drones deep into Russian territory to attack oil and gas infrastructure, often creating enormous explosions in Russian cities. Russia claims that these attacks have killed more than 700 civilians so far this year,

• 23:26Matt Bevan?

  including seven tourists killed on a Black Sea beach. Now, all of this is to say that the sudden shift from Trump and Team MAGA comes at a very good time, because Ukraine could really use America's help. But there's a catch. While all this has been going on, the US's missile stockpiles have apparently been depleted by their war in Iran, which means they can't afford to supply Ukraine. Reuters has reported that they've virtually run out of certain types of munitions. It's a bit of a catch-22 for the Ukrainians. They rely on the US for missiles, but also the US running out of missiles might mean that Trump is more keen to buy their drones.

• 24:10Matt Bevan?

  So if Ukraine is able to convince Donald Trump that helping them will help him in Iran, then suddenly Ukraine goes from being an annoying distraction to a genuinely useful ally. And that might just give Zelensky the advantage he needs. Because here's the thing, the full-scale war in Ukraine has now been going longer than World War One. So they'll take whatever opportunities they can get.

• 24:43Matt Bevan?

  If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd. Next week, we're chatting to Jonathan Swan from The New York Times. He's one of the journalists with the most direct access to Donald Trump. And along with his colleague Maggie Haberman, he's written a new book called Regime Change, about the first year and a bit of Donald Trump's second term in office. They've got some extraordinary stories about what Trump has been up to, and Jonathan has some great insights into where this presidency is going. I'll catch you then.