Lindsey Graham died on July 11–12, weeks after his tenth trip to Kyiv. He'd just landed the breakthrough he'd spent over a year chasing: a bipartisan sanctions bill on russia's war economy, negotiated with a White House that had spent most of Trump's term skeptical of continued Ukraine support.
He'd stood in front of captured Russian tanks in central Kyiv announcing that agreement days before he died.
Ukraine's PM Svyrydenko called him someone who, throughout the full-scale invasion, "stood with Ukraine and in defense of democratic values."
Washington Post coverage since his death has framed Ukraine as losing its clearest remaining link into Trump's inner circle — the guy who could get in the room and argue for the money, at a moment when Kyiv is already losing other Republican allies in Congress.
Graham was a good ally of Ukraine.
However.
Graham was also a backer of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" and the SAVE America Act, pieces of Trump legislation whose voter-eligibility and spending provisions land hardest on Black voters, LGBTQ people, low-income workers, who had the least say in shaping them.
Terrell Jermaine Starr writes:
“Graham was also a xenophobic, Islamophobic bigot whose views undermined the national security and democratic values of the United States—and indirectly, Ukraine.
As a Black man, I cannot sit in Ukraine’s capital city and write the same tributes and well-wishes as other white foreign policy professionals who aren’t the targets of his Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Blackness and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies. Graham supported Donald Trump’s racist deployment of ICE agents who hunt down immigrants, kill innocent Americans in the process and cause the deaths of dozens of people under the false guise of protecting America’s borders.”
Terrell and I discuss Graham’s figure and what’s next for Ukraine and the U.S.
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