US Senator Graham suggests assassinating Putin

WASHINGTON: United States Senator Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina legislator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral, foreign media reported on Friday.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”

Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up t

Russian officials also attacked Graham’s comments as “criminal” and demanded that the US government provide an explanation for his rhetoric. “The degree of Russophobia and hatred in the United States towards Russia is off the scale,” the Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said in a Facebook post. “It is impossible to believe that a senator of a country that promotes its moral values as a ‘guiding star’ for all mankind could afford to call for terrorism as a way to achieve Washington’s goals in the international arena.”

The White House has criticised Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: "That’s not the position of the United States government and certainly not a statement you would hear come from the mouth of anybody working in this administration".