Graham Wants to ‘Crush’ Russian Oil Customers: ‘Putin Could Give A Damn’

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during an appearance on NBC‘s Meet The Press urged the U.S. to target nations who buy Russian oil, even those with whom the U.S. has strong ties, such as India.

“The one thing I can tell you: Putin could give a damn about sanctions,” Graham told NBC host Kristen Welker. “He evades them. He could give a damn about how many Russians die.”

“The one thing that he can’t tolerate and live with, if we go after his customers,” Graham said. “The whole goal is to crush his customers, India, and China, and Brazil.”

Why It Matters

President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign repeatedly pledged to quickly end the conflict in Ukraine once he got into office, and he made good faith efforts to immediately act on his word and tried to wrangle a deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

However, Trump quickly discovered that the situation would prove more complicated, and that he would have to contend with two leaders deeply entrenched in their positions on what constituted victory in the now-three year old conflict.

Trump by April started to publicly question whether Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom the president often touted a close working relationship, was “just tapping me along” and dragging out the conflict while pretending to seek a peace deal.

This culminated in his statements in May, in which Trump said he was “not happy with what Putin is doing,” and he declared, “I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time. Always gotten along with him, but he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all.”

What To Know

The U.S. has considered a number of novel approaches to the Ukraine conflict to deter Putin and finally end the fighting, including a high-profile minerals deal with Ukraine that Trump officials argued would create economic ties and protection for the embattled former Soviet state.

The next approach has been to target the major buyers of Russian oil, which includes India – a country with which the U.S. has worked to develop closer ties, especially as it continues to grow at an incredible rate that has seen it overtake the United…