Republican Senator and a familiar Trump supporter, Lindsey Graham said that he had cautioned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “not to take the bait” and engage in a war of words with US President Donald Trump hours before the dramatic diplomatic encounter between the two presidents at the White House that amazed the world.
A vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and one of the largest supporters of Ukraine on the Republican side, Graham met Zelenskyy before the latter’s Oval Office meeting on February 28.
I said to him this morning, ‘Don’t take the bait. Don’t let the media or anyone else provoke you into an argument with President Trump. What he’s doing today is resetting the relationship’,\” he said to the reporters. The senator also supported Trump and Vice-President JD Vance for taking a stand for the Americans. He recommended Zelenskyy to resign stating that it’s unclear if the United States can ever conduct business with Zelenskyy.
What I witnessed in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know that we could ever do business with Zelenskyy again. I believe most Americans viewed a guy that they would not want to go into business with, the way he conducted the meeting,” the South Carolina Republican said.
What began as a chivalrous photo shoot escalated into a shouting exchange between the two leaders, taking the two nations’ relations to a new low. During the Oval Office meeting, Trump reprimanded Zelenskyy and stated that the latter was “gambling with World War Three”. He added that a ceasefire with Russia is “fairly close” and that the agreement to let the US utilize Ukraine’s natural resources would be “very fair”.
