WASHINGTON: United States Senator Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after a South Carolina lawmaker suggested killing Vladimir Putin to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Foreign media reported Friday that Graham first made the suggestion on Fox News host Sean Hannity's show Thursday evening, and then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian army? The only way for someone in Russia to get this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You do your country – and the world – a great service will be doing it."
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed in 1944 for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler. 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 the dark for the rest of your life, isolated in abject poverty from the rest of the world." -Want to be isolated, and stay in the dark, you need to step up
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 of Russia in the United States is off," Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to the US, said in a Facebook post. "It is impossible to believe that the senator of a country that promotes its moral values as a 'guiding star' for all mankind is calling for terrorism as a way of achieving Washington's goals in the international arena." could."
The White House has criticized Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: "This is not the position of the United States government and certainly not a statement that you would hear from the mouth of someone working in this administration".
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