Republican Senator to Putin Your Days Are Numbered

A Republican Senator from South Carolina mocked Vladimir Putin for awarding Russian citizenship to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and warned that the President’s “days are numbered.”

Snowden was awarded Russian citizenship by Putin on Monday, nine years after he revealed the scope of covert surveillance activities carried out by the NSA. Snowden was a former intelligence contractor for the United States.

According to a tweet by Senator Lindsey Graham on Monday afternoon, “Now that Edward Snowden has been granted full Russian citizenship, I expect he will be on the battlefield in Ukraine fighting for Putin any day now.”

On Monday, State Department spokesperson Ned Price reiterated the United States’ position that Snowden should be tried for espionage.

Is it possible Snowden may be spared while other Russians are ordered to participate in an aggressive war on Putin’s behalf? In a statement by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, he will not be fighting in Putin’s Military. Additionally, Snowden has not relinquished his U.S. citizenship and hopes to return one day.

After disclosing classified papers in 2013, which exposed extensive domestic and international monitoring activities carried out by the NSA, where Snowden worked, he fled the United States and was granted refuge in Russia. Snowden is currently 39 years old. For many years, law enforcement officials in the United States have advocated for his extradition to the country so that he might be tried for espionage crimes there. Clearly, Russia has no intention of returning Mr. Snowden to the U.S.

The senator swiftly added, “I feel today, more than ever, Putin’s days are numbered,” followed by a period of silence.

People condemned Graham earlier this year for expressing optimism that someone would “take out” Putin and maintaining that the Russian president needed to be neutralized.

Graham asked whether he still supports the call for Putin to be assassinated, and in response, Graham said hope he’ll be taken out in one way or another.” It doesn’t matter to Graham how they get rid of Putin, and it doesn’t matter whether he’s tried in the Hague or elsewhere; he just wants him gone.

Graham described Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons to “protect” land in Ukraine that he is attempting to annex as “gaslighting” in an interview that aired the previous week on Newsmax. Graham added that Putin was “gaslighting” the world.

On Wednesday’s episode of “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Graham stated that his opponent was “losing.”  According to Graham, he is losing on the battlefield, and around 20 political people [in Russia] are urging him to resign.

In contrast to the vague public pronouncements made by President Joe Biden regarding the consequences of Russia using nuclear weapons, the administration has been communicating with Moscow in private over the past few months.

Sources quoted by The Washington Post state that these private messages warn of severe repercussions that would result from the deployment of tactical, battlefield nukes as well as smaller precision nuclear bombs, should Russia decide to escalate the war effort in Ukraine.