Russia is a character in most U.S. political debates today, and the violence in Charlottesville the weekend of August 11 was no different. By Monday John Schindler, a columnist for the conservative outlet The Observer, was attributing the racist rally in part to Russian meddling. Schindler pointed to march organizer Richard Spencer’s various ideological ties to Moscow and warned of ominous possibilities: “There are no publicly known cases of American right-wing radicals receiving terrorist training from Russian intelligence, but this may only be a matter of time.”

“Preposterous — the author is a known conspiracy theorist,” replies Sean Guillory, founder of the Russia Blog Podcast and a Russia expert who teaches courses at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russia and East European Studies. (Guillory points to a Vox article in May charging that Schindler is among a group of commentators who constitute a “fake news bubble” on Russia.) Guillory views thinking like Schindler’s as an enormous exaggeration of Russia’s soft power. “Maybe in Eastern Europe, but not here,” he says. “They have RT and Sputnik. We have Ironman.”

That’s part of an intensifying U.S. debate over the importance of Russian disinformation in domestic politics. What’s at stake is the direction of the U.S.-Russia relationship — and time will tell whether it’s salvageable or beyond repair, say Russia experts.

At the most visible level, it’s an intramural argument among media personalities and politicians within the same political families. On the left, liberal Peter Beinart argues that progressives like Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald are letting their opposition to U.S. militarism blind them to the reality of Russian interference. On the right, Fox News analyst Ralph Peters and Fox News host Tucker Carlson got into a bitter on-air exchange when Peters compared Vladimir Putin to Hitler and accused Carlson of “cheering for” Putin.