The late senator was right on Ukraine.
The late senator was right on Ukraine.
L indsey Graham spent the last Friday of his life in Kyiv, where he announced that he had finally gotten President Trump’s blessing for his new Russia sanctions bill. He flew home. The next night, an aortic dissection killed him at age 71 in his house on Capitol Hill. Since Russia is a leader in developing hard-to-detect assassination chemicals and one of the few nations in the world to use targeted assassinations as a tool of foreign policy, an investigation was conducted into his cause of death. So far, the preliminary findings indicate that the senator died of natural causes.
This brings us to the important subject of how best to honor a man who led many of America’s foreign policy debates and was respected, and even loved, by many Republicans and Democrats.
Washington’s customary way of honoring a dead legislator is to put his name on a post office. The Senate has done better. On Thursday, Richard Blumenthal and Darline Graham — Lindsey’s sister, sworn into his seat last week — introduced S. 5025, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, with more than 60 co-sponsors including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.). Representative Mike McCaul (R., Texas), a longtime Ukraine hawk, has promised the House companion and asked his colleagues to pass it in his friend’s honor.
They should — not because Graham is dead, but because he was right, and the bill has never been better timed.
Start with what it is not. It is not an aid package: It appropriates nothing, deploys no one, guarantees no borders. It is a sanctions-and-tariff bill aimed at those nations that buy Russian crude oil and gas, which are Russia’s actual financiers for its brutal four-plus-year war on Ukraine. Blumenthal, in his subtle way, calls the penalties “bone-crushing.” The sanctions are aimed at governments in Beijing, New Delhi, and Brasília and will not impact Ukrainian allies who still import Russian energy (almost all of whom are moving to other energy sources as quickly as possible).
For four years, the objection to strangling Russia’s energy trade was that it would not work: Moscow would find buyers, the shadow fleet would sail, the discount would widen, and we would have insulted India for nothing. That objection has been overtaken by Ukrainian missiles and drones. Since late March, Ukraine has launched more than 50 strikes on refineries, depots, and transfer nodes. Russian crude processing fell in June to roughly 3.5 million barrels a day, the lowest in more than two decades and down a quarter year-on-year. A third of the country’s refining capacity is now offline, and the situation is getting worse by the day.
Long lines for fuel and gasoline rationing have spread to more than half of Russia’s regions, and average Russians are furious. The Kremlin has authorized refiners to drop from Euro-5 to Euro-3 standards, which is the energy equivalent of watering the soup. Russia is even importing gasoline. From India.
That is the whole argument in one breath. India took a record 2.7 million barrels a day of Russian crude in June, a huge share of Moscow’s seaborne exports. India paid with hard currency that helped finance the Kremlin’s continued attacks on Ukraine. That money, as of today, is completely untouched by Western sanctions. Ukrainian drones are destroying Putin’s ability to refine his own oil, so Indian refiners pay him well below market for the crude he can no longer process, and they sell him back refined gasoline at a sizable profit.
Kyiv has done the hard part, with ever-advancing drone and missile technology and extraordinary courage. The part Kyiv cannot do is ensuring that those countries financing Russia’s war do not profit from the “blood oil” they are buying. This is precisely what the Senate bill introduced by Blumenthal and Graham does. The Ukrainians built the hammer; Graham spent his last years building the anvil.
Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who wants to slow the bill down, is not frivolous when he warns of unintended consequences and points to what the Iran war did to shipping. Tariffs are taxes, and taxes touching some of the world’s largest oil importers will be felt. But S. 5025 is a much better bill than its predecessor. The additions to last year’s bill are concessions: The president gets waiver authority in exchange for telling Congress why he used it. That is not a straitjacket. It is a kill switch for Trump to use at the right time.
Conservatives skeptical of the new bill need to think about that. A president who has spent 18 months trying to drag Putin to the negotiating table would gain sizable leverage that he now lacks: the power to make Russian barrels radioactive to the major customers now keeping the Russian war machine funded. Leverage is not warmongering. It is the precondition of the peace deal the president says he wants.
All that it takes for peace in Ukraine is for Moscow to agree. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells every American passing through Kyiv, McCaul included, that he will take a cease-fire tomorrow. Putin has strenuously resisted any peace plan or even negotiations since he started the war. But his summer offensive has so far yielded only marginal gains, after Russia suffered net territorial losses this spring, at a cost experts put near 40,000 soldiers killed or wounded in June alone. Putin is not persisting because he is winning. He is persisting because he can still pay. Remove that ability and you have not widened the war, you have dramatically shortened it.
The votes are there. Thune says he will move the bill once the White House has blessed the final text. McCaul has promised to introduce a companion bill in the House this week. The only question is whether congressional leaders think helping end the war in Ukraine sooner and further weakening one of our biggest global adversaries is worth a few critical days of floor time in an election summer. From the vantage of history, that decision should not be a hard one. Defeating Nazi Germany was not easy either, but 80 years later the wisdom of our forefathers’ sacrifices stands clear.
Senator Graham was a friend with whom I at times respectfully disagreed. Admittedly, he was not every conservative’s favorite senator. But on Ukraine, he was correct, early, forceful, and he’s now fully vindicated. He assembled the votes, won over a reluctant White House, got the text finalized, and then ran out of time by about a week.
Congress can name a building after him. Or it can pass his bill. Only one of those gets Russia out of Ukraine faster and advances, all over the world, the principles Lindsey stood for: freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. These are the principles that made America great. S. 5025 would be a fitting tribute to our nation’s 250th and to a great senator, not to mention our courageous, long-suffering allies in Ukraine.
Gregory Slayton and Sergei Ivashenko are co-authors of the recent book Portraits of Ukraine: A Nation at War. They are giving all profits from book sales to pro-Ukrainian charities.