Opinion | Congress met with Putin’s proxies. They do not represent Russia.

Last week, five members of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament were in Washington to meet with members of Congress and Trump administration officials. The delegation — the first since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in March 2014 — was headed, symbolically, by Vyacheslav Nikonov, a lawmaker from Putin’s United Russia party and the grandson of Joseph Stalin’s Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Russian visitors were hosted on Capitol Hill by a bipartisan group of House members — four Republicans and one Democrat — led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), a longtime opponent of U.S. assistance to Ukraine and a supporter of normalizing relations with Moscow, who vowed to “continue to foster this dialogue.”