Updated July 15, 2026 at 11:55 AM CDT
A day before his death, Sen. Lindsey Graham was in Kyiv, triumphantly declaring a deal had been reached with the White House on a sanctions bill the South Carolina Republican believed would compel Russia to end its four-year assault on Ukraine.
"I've never been more optimistic than I am today that we have the formula to end this war," Graham proclaimed.
Ukraine had long been a top issue for the Air Force veteran turned legislative power broker, who championed an interventionist foreign policy approach with a much more isolationist White House.
"We've been working for the last year on this bill," said Texas GOP Rep. Michael McCaul, who had separate discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week. "Lindsey wanted to work with the White House so that when we would introduce a bill, the White House wouldn't object. And we're finally there." A White House official says the president supports the bill, whose text was unveiled Tuesday.
McCaul called Graham a mentor.
"We were a sort of Reagan generation, if you will, that believe that America is strongest at home when we are strong abroad, that we're not the isolationist party," he said. "We've learned the lessons from World War II — not to be a Chamberlain, but rather a Churchill."
Richard Fontaine was Sen. John McCain's foreign policy adviser in 2004, when he joined the then freshmen Sen. Graham on his first trip to Ukraine.
"Sen. Graham was quite taken with the democratic movement and the Western leaning activists of Ukraine at the time," said Fontaine, now the CEO of the Center for a New American Security. "[McCain and Graham] saw a Russia that was emerging from the end of the Cold War and going in a very different direction, more democratic, more Western friendly, certainly less aggressive, and then take this detour under President Putin. I think that explains why this was such a passion project for Sen. Graham for over two decades."
McCain and Graham made up two-thirds of the "three amigos," alongside Sen. Joe Lieberman, who traveled the globe promoting a muscular, hawkish foreign policy.
Graham and Trump
On Ukraine and other foreign policy matters, Graham would go on to become one of President Trump's closest advisers — a far cry from where the two began their relationship in 2015 when they competed for the GOP presidential nomination.
Graham didn't hold back his distaste of the real estate tycoon at the time, calling him "a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" who "doesn't represent my party."
But when Trump became president, Graham began to shift gears.
"The bottom line is he won. I lost. People in South Carolina expect me to work with him," he told NPR in 2019. "He's proven to me that he's been a better president than I thought he — really, I had very low expectations. But what he does is he listens to people, including me and others."
Fontaine said a prime example of Graham's influence on Trump can be seen in Syria. Initially, Trump wanted to withdraw all U.S. forces from the country beginning in 2018. But Fontaine said Graham was concerned a full withdrawal would invite ISIS in and abandon the Kurdish allies who had fought alongside Americans.
"And so Sen. Graham brokered an agreement by which Trump would leave some of the troops in place," he said. "Sen. Graham came up with some of these ideas and had access to the president to be able to sell this deal, and it worked."
Fontaine attributes Graham's political pivot towards Trump to a desire "to be constructive."
"If he had just been completely opposed to President Trump, he wouldn't have gotten a hearing. If he had been completely supportive of President Trump, it wouldn't have mattered because he would have just been supporting his policies," he said. "On issues like Syria, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Israel normalization, I think Sen. Graham was hoping to push U.S. policy in the right direction and to do that through President Trump."
When it came to Ukraine, it was a particularly delicate dance.
Graham's steadfast support often clashed with the America First president, along with other Republicans more skeptical of intervention after U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Iran.
But at the recent NATO summit in Turkey, Trump praised Ukrainian leadership and offered new U.S. military cooperation — a remarkable shift from earlier antagonistic meetings with Ukraine's president.
"Ukraine and the position it's in today owes much to Lindsey Graham for him steering the president in certain directions and certainly working with Congress to make sure that our support for Ukraine continued, even over President Trump's objection sometimes," former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake said in an interview with All Things Considered.
Gen. David Petraeus, former CIA director and the Army general who led U.S. forces in Iraq, first got to know Graham when the senator served under him for a brief active-duty stint during the 2007 troop surge.
"I frankly didn't really welcome that at the time. It was very, very violent. This was the last thing we needed," he said.
Graham surprised him.
"At the end of the first trip, he had some extraordinary insights. He had focused that particular trip on our detention facilities down in southern Iraq. And these were really forehead slapping moments," he said. "I thought I was not going to have someone show up for a week and come back with something that we hadn't thought through or considered. And it was the case."
He said it was the start of a longtime friendship, and that Graham was open with him about his shift from Trump critic to confidante.
"It was quite simple. He said he wanted to continue to influence our foreign policy," he said. "And to do that, he needed to make some concessions in terms of domestic politics, in a relationship with a president who he'd criticized when that president was running for office and developed a very strong friendship with the president."
That friendship gave Graham the president's ear on Iran — where he pushed Trump to maintain an aggressive military posture — and on Israel as one of the Senate's most fervent supporters of supplying the country with military aid.
"Israel has lost one of it's greatest friends," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after Graham's death. "America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend."
Tributes from abroad and in Congress
His was far from the only tribute that came pouring in from world leaders after Graham's passing.
Zelenskyy noted Graham visited Ukraine 10 times during the years of Russia's assault and called Graham a "true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer."
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte called Graham a "powerful advocate for America who believed strongly in the NATO Alliance and was actively working to bring an end to Russia's war in Ukraine."
Graham's congressional colleagues have said a fitting tribute to honor his legacy would be to pass his hard-fought Russia sanctions bill.
That bill seeks to impose sanctions on top Russian political and military leaders, along with Russian financial institutions and energy projects. It would prohibit U.S. persons from making new investments in Russia's energy sector, impose tariffs on imports from countries that are among the world's top five purchasers of Russian crude oil or natural gas, and calls for the United States Trade Representative to reassess the top five purchasers every 180 days.
McCaul said he hopes to name the legislation after Graham.
Copyright 2026 NPR
