Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senior senator and foreign policy hawk who was one of Ukraine’s most vocal supporters in the US administration and a leading advocate of regime change in Iran, suddenly died on the evening of July 11 at the age of 71 from a “brief and sudden illness”, his office announced the following morning.

Graham’s office offered no additional details on the illness, but according to Bloomberg, citing police scanner audio reports, he was struck down by a “cardiac arrest”.

Graham has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine, travelling to Kyiv ten times during Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour, now into its fifth year. He returned from Kyiv on July 10 only one day before his death, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other senior officials as well as touring drone factories and other defence installations.

A former critic of US President Donald Trump, during Trump’s second term he became a staunch supporter, trying to pressure the Trump administration into increasing its support of Bankova.

Famously, Graham called the Ukraine conflict, “the best investment we have ever made,” pointing out that the war costs less than 5% of US military spending, while significantly degrading Russia’s military power and costing no US lives at all.

Critics point to his cynical stance of “fighting to the last Ukrainian”, although he never used that exact formulation, and claim that Graham’s comments confirm the Kremlin claim that the US is fighting a proxy war with Russia, using the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to do the fighting.

“As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they’ll fight to the last person,” he said at a Munich Security Conference (MSC) speech in 2024. “This is a great deal for America. Not one American is dying. We’re helping Ukraine destroy the Russian army.”

During another visit to Kyiv, he praised US military aid by saying: “The Russians are dying... It’s the best money we’ve ever spent.”

Graham was “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on July 12. “He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!!”

Iran Hawk Graham

Graham was equally prominent as Washington’s loudest advocate of regime change in Tehran, a cause he pursued for three decades and pressed with renewed energy as this year’s US-Iran confrontation escalated. As a House member in the 1990s he backed policies aimed at isolating Iran and limiting its missile and nuclear programmes, and he cheered Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear sites in June last year.

When protests over record inflation and the collapse of the rial spread across more than 280 locations in Iran at the turn of the year, Graham cast the unrest as a once-in-a-generation opening. Iran was “a nation run by religious nazis” that had been weakened by Trump’s efforts to isolate it economically and use military force wisely, he posted on X in January, declaring it was time to “Make Iran Great Again”, a slogan he repeated relentlessly in the months that followed.

His embrace of Iran’s royalist opposition went further than that of any other senior US politician. On January 14 he met Reza Pahlavi, the Virginia-based former crown prince of Iran, in Washington, presenting the son of the last shah with two caps embroidered with the Make Iran Great Again slogan and recording a joint video message in which he praised the prince’s passion and pledged that “it will be up to the people of Iran to pick their next leader”. 

The meeting fuelled speculation that Washington was preparing to anoint the former prince, who had not set foot in Iran for more than four decades but had emerged as the most prominent voice of the protest movement, calling for nationwide strikes, road blockades and the replacement of the Islamic Republic’s flag with the shah-era Lion and Sun banner.

Graham amplified those calls at every turn. In one X post he defended Pahlavi’s rejection of negotiations with the regime as “beyond reasonable criticism”, likened Trump’s backing of the protesters to Ronald Reagan’s demand to tear down the Berlin Wall, and declared the Middle East to be on the cusp of its biggest change in a thousand years.

The senator took his campaign to the Munich Security Conference in February, where he appeared alongside Pahlavi, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Zelenskiy in what became a de facto platform on the future of the Islamic Republic.

Addressing a rally of Iranian protesters in the city, Graham waved the pre-1979 Lion and Sun flag and told the crowd it was a moment of choosing, siding with the Iranian people over a “murderous ayatollah” whose time had come to go. At a townhall panel with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, he compared supreme leader Ali Khamenei to Hitler, argued the regime was at its weakest point since the 1979 revolution, and said he would carry a blunt message to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE the following week: diplomacy if possible, but the moment must not be allowed to pass. 

Graham initially insisted that regime change was not official US policy, telling CBS’s Face the Nation that toppling the government was not the purpose of the American strikes, yet, while warning that a single Iranian attack on an American anywhere in the Middle East would change that.

After the joint US-Israeli strikes that killed Khamenei and other senior leaders, Graham said he had spoken with Pahlavi about new leadership in Iran and pledged that no American troops would occupy the country. “This is not Iraq, this is not Germany, this is not Japan,” he said, adding that the goal was to ensure that whoever Iranians chose could never again preside over the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.

Doubling down on Russian sanctions

Graham pushed the Trump administration to increase the sanctions on Russia to extreme levels, tabling a bipartisan bill in the Senate to impose 500% tariffs on countries that continued to trade with Russia. In particular he was looking at China and India that have ignored western oil price cap sanctions and continued to import large amounts of Russian oil, paying market prices, albeit heavily discounted prices.

Graham teamed up with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal to introduce the bipartisan Sanctioning Russia Act, one of the most aggressive sanctions proposals since the start of the war. The bill, which attracted more than 80 bipartisan co-sponsors in the Senate, was never passed or adopted by the Trump administration, which introduced its own threat of sanctions at lower levels.

Eventually, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on India to New Delhi’s outrage, but never followed through on threats to impose extreme sanctions on China, after Beijing threatened to cut off exports of rare earth metals (REMs) to the US.

Graham was also the driving force behind the so-called minerals deal with Ukraine, signed on April 30 in the first year of the war. The Trump administration made continued US support of Ukraine contingent on Bankova agreeing to signing off on mining concessions.

Graham claimed in a 2022 interview that Ukraine is home to “trillions of dollars’ worth” of critical minerals and REMs. However, as IntelliNews reported, Ukraine has no REMs at all and limited deposits of critical minerals of which graphite and lithium are the most important.

Graham was very likely citing a report released in December 2024 by the Nato Energy Security Centre of Excellence, based in Lithuania, which is not actually part of Nato. The report fallaciously claimed Ukraine was home to trillions of dollars of REMs, but went on to list the elements, none of which are actually REMs – the list was largely of critical mineral deposits, which are still important to the tech sector, but worth a few hundreds of millions of dollars at best.

Moreover, Ukraine has completely ignored developing almost all of these deposits that would take billions of dollars over at least a decade to bring into production. Nevertheless, the minerals deal became a major diplomatic sticking point in Bankova’s efforts to secure US support in its war against Russia, support Trump eventually withdrew anyway.

The veteran Republican lawmaker had served in the Senate since January 2002. Before that Graham was a House member from 1995 to 2003 and a South Carolina state lawmaker. He chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2021 and was most recently chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

Graham has been dogged with accusations that he was a homosexual, which would make him one of the most senior gay politicians in the US. However, he denied that he was gay and most of the obituaries being written on his death have avoided the topic, saying only that he was a “life-long bachelor” with no children. US media is traditionally squeamish about outing such individuals. 

Contrary to rumours about his sexuality, Graham had generally taken socially conservative positions on LGBT rights throughout his Senate career. In 2006, he supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, saying: “I believe in the traditional definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman.”

Among his last legislative efforts, Graham was part of another bipartisan group of senators who claimed last week to have reached an agreement with the Trump administration to move ahead with another new sanctions package on Russia, raising the prospect of more US economic pressure on the Kremlin to halt its war in Ukraine.

“I’m grateful to Lindsey for recognizing our warriors. The stronger Ukraine is on the battlefield, the greater the chances that diplomacy will ultimately succeed,” Zelenskiy said in an X post on July 11.

Graham’s death will come as a blow for Bankova which has tirelessly been lobbying the White House for support with little success. However, at the most recent Ankara Nato summit on July 8 the tide appeared to have turned after Trump offered Ukraine licence to make Patriot missiles in a radical about face on his policies to support Ukraine’s military in its fight against Russia.