The article doesn’t address how the timing of the ad relates to the timing of his trip to Russia

Why would it? There's no hard evidence. The whole point of the image is to show how suspicious the timing is. It would still be suspicious even without the KGB claim.

who booked the trip

We know who booked the trip because it is in The Art of the Deal.

whether InTourist is run by the KG

A former GRU spy and a historian say it was. I didn't find anything to lead me to believe that it wasn't but maybe I didn't look hard enough. It also behaved in a manor consistent with my expectations of a KGB run tourist agency but that's just vibes.

this image doesn’t do anything but force me to go try and verify these claims on my own.

Unfortunately, in this day and age you should be making an effort to verify everything before you believe it. How much of an effort is going to vary based on how important the thing is to you.

Here's a couple sources to get you started:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190113232410/https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4116&context=edissertations

In my country voting is:

• universal,
• secret
• mandatory

We also get the day off for voting.

In electoral times, it's really a hassle, everyone voting at the same time. We usually screw up and end up voting fascism too, but at least you know for sure that more than half the population is stupid. You know than more than half of your coworkers, family, friends, are idiots. No electoral college, no gerrymandering. Just plain idiots.

You guys are not even sure how many idiots you have.

Edit: I want to be clear, I don't like or support fascism, be it democratically elected or quiet quitting democracy what put them in power.

I'm gonna say that I don't really care if the KGB "convinced" a private citizen to take out an ad. Seriously: if some dude stopped me on the street and offered me $1M to buy $100k of AdSense saying NATO started the war in Ukraine, I'd probably do that. Who really cares what I, or some 80s real-estate schmuck, pastes on the side of walls? Trump never made any secret of being an anything-for-money person.

I'd expect to get fired. I'd expect it to be disqualifying for public office. So, to me, the thing that's actually disturbing is how many of our political leaders & how much of the public at large is willing to go along with and even celebrate the propaganda for free. Betray their stated ideals for free.

In 1983 Graydon Carter (later editor of Spy and Vanity Fair) was assigned to write a profile of trump for GQ magazine. In the profile, Carter mentioned that trump's hands seemed "too small for his body". When the issue came out, trump sent out his minions to buy up as many copies of GQ in NYC as they could get their hands on, to prevent people from reading it. Apparently, this led to greater-than-normal sales of that issue which prompted publisher Si Newhouse to greenlight trump's book The Art of the Deal.