Laura Loomer, Lindsey Graham and the deepening Iran crisis: what’s behind Trump’s reset with Zelenskyy?

As leadership pairings go, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a match made in heaven.

It is a far cry from the warm rapport and kindred spiritedness that defined Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Margaret Thatcher, or even the guarded pragmatic friendliness Reagan forged with Mikhail Gorbachev to effectively end the cold war.

Yet from a calamitous start that saw Trump publicly ambush and then virtually expel Zelenskyy from the White House after an explosive meeting in February 2025, relations between the US president and his Ukrainian counterpart have taken an unexpectedly warm turn.

The thaw has coincided with the US-Israeli war with Iran – and appears to have accelerated as Trump has struggled to end the conflict.

A memorandum of understanding, signed in June and designed to institute a 60-day ceasefire, has been rendered moot as hostilities have resumed over the status of the strait of Hormuz, the strategically vital waterway that Iran has effectively closed from the start of the war – threatening the stability of the global economy.

“There’s no question that he’s warmed up to Zelenskyy,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and a former White House adviser on European affairs. “We’ve gone from a phase in which he was throwing Zelenskyy out of the Oval Office, and turning his back on him, to a situation today where they seem to have a reasonably good relationship, and where there have now been a succession of meetings that have gone well.”

This week, the pair met once more at the White House after Zelenskyy travelled to Washington for the funeral of Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who had staunchly backed Ukraine in its war with Russia, even as Trump and his Maga movement all but threw in their lot with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

The encounter followed another at this month’s Nato summit in Ankara, when Trump strikingly praised Zelenskyy – whom he had once labelled a “dictator” – and said he would grant licenses for Ukraine to develop its own Patriot missile interceptors, although he cast doubt on that promise at a cabinet meeting on Friday.

It also came on the heels of an arguably even more remarkable occurrence: the meeting in Kyiv between Zelenskyy and Laura Loomer, the far-right social media influencer known to have sway with Trump, and who has previously vocally supported Russia.

After meeting the Ukrainian leader, Loomer said she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda and admitted having believed “a lot of untrue things” about Ukraine. She also said she had followed the meeting with a phone call to Trump and that her change of view was affecting sentiment across the Maga movement.

This sea change may have several causes, from Trump’s mercurial nature and preference for backing a winner to Putin’s stubborn refusal to accept several favorable peace deals after Trump vowed to settle the conflict “on day one” of his second presidency.

Yet one potential factor stands out among all others.

While administration officials have offered no explanation, the accelerating thaw between Trump and Zelenskyy has coincided with the US’s deepening difficulties in concluding the war with Iran’s hardline Islamic regime that Trump launched, along with Israel, on 28 February.

“At a moment when he is stuck in a war, faced with bad military options, and suddenly the Ukrainians are approaching him no longer asking for American charity but offering help, I find it quite plausible that that could be a reason, amongst many probably, as to why Trump’s attitude appears to have shifted in a rather strong way,” said Trita Parsi, an Iranian analyst who is vice-president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Tehran’s retaliation with drone attacks on US military bases and infrastructure in allied Gulf kingdoms has served to illustrate the shared interest between Kyiv and Washington. Ukraine, too, came under sustained attack from Iranian Shahed drones after Tehran supplied them to Moscow in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022.

Ukraine has since responded by becoming a world leader in defensive drone technology, an innovation it has trumpeted to the US and its Gulf allies since they came under fire from the weapons as Iran responded to the military onslaught on its territory.

Zelenskyy told UK MPs in March that 200 Ukrainian military experts had been dispatched to 11 countries across the Gulf – including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait – to advise on how to combat Shahed drones.

Not just a taker, but a giver

Last weekend, Ukraine was accused of trying to merge the two conflicts after it struck an Iranian commercial vessel on the Caspian Sea. Kyiv justified the strike by saying that the ship was being used to transport arms to Russia. Iran said the strike had killed an Iranian sailor and threatened retaliation.

Preparing to meet Trump in Washington, Zelenskyy said Iran had “attacked” Ukraine by supplying weaponry to Russia.

“What do you expect, if Iran transferred new technologies to Russia from the first year of the war,” he told Sky News. “These were Shahed drones. They transferred thousands of these drones in the first year of the war. Then they issued licenses. What did they do? Did they attack us? I think so.”

Zelenskyy also vowed to share Ukrainian intelligence that he said showed Russia giving Tehran help to hit US targets. “Since the beginning of July, we have recorded active Russian satellite surveillance of the Gulf states and US military facilities located there,” he posted on X. “These images subsequently appear in Iran … There is clear correlation between Russia’s satellite imagery of these sites and Iranian strikes – both before the attacks, in preparation for them, and afterward, to assess the damage.”

Kupchan, of the Council of Foreign Relations, said Zelenskyy was being a “good salesman” in persuading Trump that Ukraine was an ally worth supporting, by contributing help that the US needs – thus appealing to the US president’s transactional instincts.

“Zelensky has done a very good job of communicating to Trump that he is going to help him on Iran,” said Kupchan. “He travelled in the Gulf and said, ‘I’m going to help you deal with Iran and drones, because we’ve been there and done that.’

“It’s an investment in his relationships with Trump, and with Europe, because he’s demonstrating Ukraine’s value as an ally. And I think Trump, who is endlessly transactional, might actually agree to help Ukraine a bit more because Ukraine has stepped up when America’s chips are down in the war with Iran.

“The case for helping Ukraine is even stronger now, because Ukraine has demonstrated that it is not just a taker, but a giver.”

However, the US president’s apparent vacillation over his Patriot missile pledge shows that cultivating Trump is always at the mercy of his mercurial nature.

Some analysts warn that Ukraine risks turning two local localized wars into a global conflict by “merging the battlefields” - thereby inviting Tehran to widen the scope of any retaliatory measures.

Sina Toossi, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, said Ukraine’s intervention bolstered the view in Tehran that the Russia-Ukraine war, and Iran’s confrontation with the US, are becoming a single, interconnected conflict.

“Trump’s apparent warming toward Zelensky only strengthens this perception,” he said. “The likely implication is not an immediate missile strike on Ukraine, but a broader expansion of where Tehran believes it can legitimately impose costs.”

Recognition of such dangers appeared to spur Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, to call his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, immediately after Zelenskyy’s latest meeting with Trump.

“I stressed that our goal is to avoid unnecessary escalation,” Sybiha wrote on social media. “All of Ukraine’s actions are aimed solely at defending our country from Russian aggression and never intended to target civilian vessels or people.”

Parsi said Ukraine’s involvement could have the effect of “reframing” the Iran war, so that it would no longer be perceived merely as serving an agenda set by Israel, but as helping to defend Ukraine.

That might appeal to European countries, and Democrats in the US, who have broadly opposed the Iran war, but supported Ukraine. Yet, even with Loomer’s belated conversion to the Ukrainian cause, it seems far less likely to impress Trump’s base.

“The centre of gravity in the Maga movement is still skeptical of foreign wars, and of sending large amounts of money to Ukraine, and I don’t see that changing,” said Kupchan.

Matt Duss, vice-president of the Center for International Policy, warned that Zelenskyy’s efforts to help Trump with Iran risked undermining support for Ukraine.

“Trying to draw closer to Israel in the war on Iran really undermines a lot of Ukraine’s case, because Israel is effectively trying to do to the Palestinians precisely what Russia has been trying to do to Ukraine, which is to erase them as a people,” said Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders. “That could potentially diminish what has been up until now pretty good bipartisan support for Ukraine.”