Lindsey Graham calls for Putin to be assassinated by someone close to him: ‘Is there a Brutus in Russia?’

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Senator Lindsey Graham has called for the assassination of Russian president Vladimir Putin by someone close to him, as the country’s invasion of Ukraine entered its ninth day on Friday.

In a statement on Twitter on Thursday, the senator from South Carolina asked if the Russian president has a “Brutus” who can take out Mr Putin and end the war.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?”

Roman politician Marcus Junius Brutus assassinated his friend and Roman general Julius Caesar, while German army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is best-known for trying to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.

“The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” the senator added. “You would be doing your country - and the world - a great service.”

In another tweet, Mr Graham said that the only way this war would end was if the Russian people decided to fix this.

Acknowledging that it was “easy to say, hard to do”, he told Russians: “Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”

Since Russia announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February, over a million people have fled the country, while intense fighting has been underway across the country.

Russian troops are trying to capture capital Kyiv, while key cities such as Kharkiv, Odesa and Mariupol remained on the brink of collapse due to missile strikes and bombings. Kherson, a major urban Ukrainian centre, became the first city to fall on Thursday. Thousands have been killed or wounded in the past week.

On Friday, a fire broke out at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine following continuous shelling of buildings by Russian troops. Though the fire was put out in a few hours, it led to fears of a catastrophic nuclear disaster that would be “ten times larger than Chernobyl” disaster of 1986.

The US, along with other western countries, have imposed sanctions on Russia against its actions in Ukraine.

Earlier this week, US president Joe Biden, in his first state of union address, called Mr Putin’s attack on Ukraine “premeditated and unprovoked”.

However, the president has faced heat from Republicans who have blamed him and not Mr Putin for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

During the state of the union address, while the president was booed by his fellow Republican lawmakers Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mr Graham had reportedly asked them to pipe down.

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