President Joe Biden is expected to announce today in Brussels that the United States will accept 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

While this would constitute a significant bump in the number of Ukrainians the US has accepted during the conflict, it’s nowhere close to the number that Eastern European countries such as Poland, Romania, Moldova, and Hungary have admitted. US officials have justified the relatively low numbers by noting that most Ukrainian refugees want to stay in Europe so they can return to their home country more easily if the conflict resolves. 

According to NBC News, the refugees will be admitted through a range of pathways, “including the US Refugee Admissions Program, nonimmigrant and immigrant visas, and other means.” Another mechanism could be “humanitarian parole,” which allows entry to individuals fleeing violence. The administration will prioritize Ukrainians with family members in the US. 

Until a few weeks ago, the Instagram influencer Kimberly Lynn had rarely dabbled in international affairs. With her long fuchsia and magenta dyed hair pulled up into a bun, she regularly updated her 20,000 followers about her home renovations, natural cleaning products, and why she chose to have her fourth baby at home. In her profile bio, she described herself as a “7 figure earner helping families create financial freedom.” Sure, she was political, but mostly she was about championing the right in the culture wars, posting memes about the dangers of vaccines (“I identify as someone who doesn’t participate in medical experiments”) and the importance of traditional gender roles (“I am ready for the alpha male variant to return.”)

In late February, though, Lynn suddenly began posting frequently about Russia and Ukraine, expressing sadness and anger about the invasion and fear for her Ukrainian relatives. “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Putin is not a white hat,” she wrote, using a term for a savior popular among some adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory. In the comments, her followers pushed back. “I’m not saying he is…but how do we actually know he isn’t?” one wrote. “He is not a white hat but he is standing in the way of the global reset,” responded another, referring to a conspiracy theory about world governments’ plan to fully control citizens. Someone else added, “What do you think of Zelensky? People are fawning all over him like he is some sort of hero…isn’t he corrupt too?”

It was clear that in criticizing Putin, Kimberly Lynn had surprised some of her followers who dwell in a part of the internet where he’s quickly becoming a far-right conspiracy theory folk hero.

In the weeks since I first reported on pro-Putin propaganda in anti-vaccine groups, the overlap between these two spheres has only grown. Last week, the Toronto Star reported a startling correlation between vaccination status and beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. More than 80 percent of vaccinated Canadians said they believed their country should help defend Ukraine, compared to less than a quarter of unvaccinated people. This dynamic is especially pronounced in extremist spaces. Some of the anti-mandate trucker convoy chats on Telegram now seem dominated by Putin cheerleading. “The US truck convoy Telegram channels are basically Russian propaganda channels now,” University of Maryland extremism scholar Caroline Orr Bueno observed on Twitter last week. “They’re sharing blatant Russian disinformation about bioweapons in Ukraine and Zelensky being a Nazi, plus content straight from the Kremlin and Russian state media.”

There is not a huge gap in the ideological differences between the far right and the truckers in convoys. But increasingly these geopolitical conspiracy theories have moved beyond extremist spaces and into the mainstream, as polished Instagram wellness influencers cheerfully share them far and wide.

The New York Times ran a piece Wednesday about US right-wingers parroting Kremlin talking points and swapping pro-Russian conspiracy theories with Moscow—most notably the unproven claim that the US government has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

As the Times reported, war-related mentions of “bioweapons labs” in Russian- and English-language media and social media have more than doubled since early March, when Moscow gave the theory a fine boost. On March 6, its Defense Ministry released a televised statement in which Russian officials claimed to have uncovered “traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.”

Just a few days later, on March 9, Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whose clips, as my colleague David Corn first reported, are being incorporated into the state media’s official propaganda strategy—dutifully aired the Defense Ministry’s statement. “Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe, is in fact, totally and completely true,” Carlson said. “Whoa!” (He was referring to Senate testimony by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who responded to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) by saying that Ukraine does have “biological research facilities,” which US officials are worried could fall into Russian hands.) 

On the day after Carlson’s broadcast, as Corn reported, Putin’s minions issued a memo with “recommendation for coverage” that ordered state media outlets to use Carlson clips on their programs. The same memo also dealt with the biolab conspiracy, Corn writes:

[It] highlights this bioweapons allegation as a top talking point for Russian media, noting the message should be that the “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe.” The document goes further, encouraging its recipients to allege that the “the United States is working on a ‘biogenocide of the Eastern Slavs.’”