In late March 2026, five members of the Russian Duma walked into the United States Capitol as guests. They were shown the Speaker's office. They were taken through the building. Then they visited the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center.

Five members of Congress hosted them. One of those five was Eli Crane, the Republican who represents Arizona's 2nd Congressional District.

The day before that visit, the European Union's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said publicly that Russia had been feeding intelligence to Iran to help it kill Americans — along with drones to attack U.S. bases and neighboring countries. The day after the visit, Ukraine's president said Russia was handing Iran satellite imagery to help target American forces in the Persian Gulf.

Crane is a former Navy SEAL.

And when reporters asked him to explain why he'd spent an afternoon escorting officials of the government accused of helping kill American service members, he said nothing at all. His office did not respond to multiple messages. There was no press release. There was no statement.

His own party called it a visit from the Third Reich

This is not a case where Democrats attacked and Republicans defended. The condemnation came from inside his own conference, and it was blunt.

"I compare this meeting on Capitol Hill as having a visit by the Third Reich," said Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "Members of the war criminal Putin regime must not be welcomed in any way."

Rep. Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who used to chair that same committee, said Vladimir Putin "should be punished for his abhorrent behavior — not rewarded," and warned that the country "must prevent Putin from exploiting the conflict in the Middle East to line his coffers or legitimize his cronies."

Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman now at CNN, called Crane and the others who hosted the delegation "traitors."

Democrats were no gentler. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois posted that "foreign political operatives of our adversaries should NEVER be allowed on Capitol Hill," and said the visit "opened the doors to a massive security threat to the Speaker, to our Congress, and to democracy itself."

The Russian delegation wasn't a group of low-level staff, either. It included Vyacheslav Nikonov, who chairs the Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee, and Alexander Darchiev, Russia's ambassador in Washington.

The meeting was organized by Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who called it a "push for peace" and posted about it on X on March 26, writing that it was the first such meeting "in close to a 1/4 century." Luna is no stranger to saying indefensible things in public — we wrote about her comparing Anthony Fauci to a Nazi death-camp doctor — but at least she put her name on this one and defended it. Crane took the tour and went quiet.

Four months later, he tried to zero out Ukraine aid — and 136 Republicans said no

If you want to know what Crane actually believes about Russia's war, you don't need his statement about the tour. You can read the roll call.

On the night of July 21, 2026, the House voted on an amendment Crane wrote. It would have barred the Pentagon from spending a dollar on Ukraine security assistance — every dollar, with one narrow exception for guarding the U.S. embassy in Kyiv.

It failed 76 to 350.

Look closely at those numbers, because they matter. Every single one of the 76 votes for Crane's amendment came from Republicans. And 136 Republicans voted against it — nearly twice as many members of his own party rejected his amendment as supported it. Not one Democrat backed it. Both the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers, and its top Democrat, Adam Smith, spoke out against it earlier that day.

This is what it looks like when a member of Congress is not merely a party-line vote but an outlier — someone whose position is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people he sits with, including the ones who agree with him about almost everything else.

This has been his position for years

Crane's record on Russia's invasion isn't a recent drift. It's a straight line.

In April 2023, he co-authored a letter with Utah Sen. Mike Lee demanding that President Biden end U.S. support for Ukraine: "Unrestrained U.S. aid for Ukraine must come to an end, and we will adamantly oppose all future aid packages unless they are linked to a clear diplomatic strategy designed to bring this war to a rapid conclusion."

Republicans for Ukraine, a conservative group that scores GOP lawmakers on the war, gives Crane an F. Their file on him logs a string of votes: for an amendment to strip $300 million in Ukraine assistance, for an amendment to prohibit all security assistance to Ukraine, for an amendment to kill lend-lease authority, and against the 2023 and 2024 Ukraine aid packages. In June 2023 he posted that the real aid America should send is "envoys to usher in peace talks."

He is not the only Republican on this site with that record. Missouri's Eric Burlison was one of just nine House members who wouldn't vote for a resolution condemning Russia for kidnapping Ukrainian children — a resolution that spent no money and sent no troops. Crane, to be clear, voted yes on that one.

But there's a difference between voting against foreign aid and personally walking Putin's legislators through the Capitol. You can believe America spends too much abroad — plenty of people do, and it's a real argument. Hosting the Duma is not a budget position. It's a gesture, and the whole point of a gesture is the message it sends.

What he says when the cameras are on

Crane has an answer ready for almost everything, as long as it's a friendly outlet.

On March 2, three days after the U.S. struck Iran, he went on the conservative channel Real America's Voice and offered a line about the war: "Toppling a regime isn't the hard part. It's what comes next." He called the U.S. operations there "dicey." That's a defensible thing to say, and he said it on camera.

Three weeks later he was hosting Russians — whose government was, according to the EU's chief diplomat, helping Iran target Americans in that very conflict — and he had nothing to say to anyone.

That pattern is the through-line of Crane's entire tenure. He does not hold in-person town halls in his district; constituents have organized "empty chair" events because he won't show up, and his office runs telephone forums instead. He gives interviews to conservative media and skips the rest.

His likely opponent in November, former Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez, put it this way: "While Arizona families struggle with rising costs at home, Eli Crane is busy giving private tours to Russian officials — one day after a report that Russia is helping Iran kill Americans in the Middle East."

We deserve an answer

Arizona's 2nd District runs from Flagstaff to Sedona, Prescott to Cottonwood and across a large stretch of rural northern Arizona.

The people who live there are entitled to hear their congressman explain, in his own words, why he thought it was appropriate to host officials of the Russian government inside the Capitol at that particular moment — and why, when a Republican colleague on the Foreign Affairs Committee compared it to welcoming the Third Reich, he decided the right response was silence.

He was asked. He didn't answer. That's a choice, and it's the same choice he makes every time something is hard to defend.

We deserve better.

Source

Warm welcome for Russian lawmakers draws backlash for Rep. Crane — Zach Bradshaw, Cronkite News, March 30, 2026. Photo: Cronkite News.