House GOP Candidate’s Ukraine Posts Echo Kremlin-Touted Propaganda Channel

In late May, Joe Kent, the GOP candidate for Congress in a crucial Washington toss-up district, posed a question on X (formerly Twitter):

“Ukraine is out of men, so their only option is to get NATO involved. What happens when Russia kills French troops in Ukraine?”

Enough foreign nationals have signed up to fight for the embattled European nation that there’s now an international legion in Ukraine. But no French combat troops ― or troops from any NATO country ― have been deployed there.

So why would Kent, a former Special Forces operator and foreign policy adviser in the Trump administration, ask such a question?

The timing of Kent’s post, at 3:37 p.m. Eastern time on May 27, came a little more than an hour after the subject of French boots on the ground was raised on a different social media app, the encrypted messaging app Telegram, by a pro-Kremlin feed.

“NATO Troops enter Ukraine after all,” read a post at 2:19 p.m. that day from a channel called Ukraine Watch. “The AFU commander-in-chief, Syrskyy, has signed a permit for French military instructors to work in training centres in Ukraine.”

(The memo signed was part of the effort to lay the groundwork for French trainers, but by itself did little, and the idea of sending trainers seemed to stall after national elections in July.)

Telegram allows users to send texts and videos between individuals, but also to sign up for feeds called “channels” that focus on specific subjects. Kent’s X post in May is just one example of many, spread throughout 2023 and 2024, in which he seems to directly echo posts from Ukraine Watch, a channel that has been held up by Russian officials as a reliable source of information about the war in Ukraine.

Kent has long been skeptical of