Lindsey Graham died on July 11, hours after announcing he had a deal with the White House on a Russia sanctions bill he had pushed for more than a year. His last political fight has become the closest thing Washington has to a new Russia policy, and it works by taxing the countries that buy Russian oil.
The bill, introduced in April 2025 by Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, was revised in mid-July after months of negotiation with the Trump administration. The original version proposed a blanket 500 percent tariff on any country importing Russian oil and gas. The revised version, unveiled a few days after Graham’s death, cuts that to tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest purchasers of Russian crude: China, India, Slovakia, Hungary and Azerbaijan. The biggest importers of Russian natural gas, a list that includes China, France, Japan, Hungary and Belgium, face the same exposure.
The softening was the price of getting the president on board. Senate aides said the changes reflected negotiations to secure Trump’s backing, and Trump endorsed the revised bill in public, saying it was in honor of Lindsey and that the measure had been his cause. He also floated adding sanctions on Iran and Hezbollah to the legislation, a suggestion Blumenthal quickly talked down. The bill is bipartisan, and supporters say it is the only Russia measure with buy-in from both parties and the White House. The obstacles lie in the House, where members are balking at the tariff provisions; proponents hope to win them over when the chamber reconvenes at the end of next month.
The mechanism is the interesting part. The bill does not sanction Russia directly; it taxes the countries that keep buying Russian energy. Graham’s logic, stated repeatedly, was that Moscow’s war machine runs on oil revenue and that the way to cut it is to go after the customers. He argued that Trump’s idea of going after Putin’s oil customers, who prop up his war machine, should be pursued with vigor by the US and Europe.
The logic is cleaner than the practice. Tariffs are paid by importers, and the cost lands on consumers in the country imposing the duty as much as on the country being punished. Analysts who follow the bill point out that the sanctions themselves are mostly discretionary, not mandatory, and come with the usual national security waivers, which means the final impact depends entirely on how the president chooses to enforce them. Petroleum products are excluded from the tariff language, which appears to let major Russian customers such as Turkey off the hook while catching smaller buyers of crude. And the record so far cuts against the theory: India scaled back its purchases of Russian oil mainly because of sanctions on Russian energy firms, not because of tariffs.
The timing adds a layer of irony. While Congress pushes to punish Russian oil buyers, the administration has relaxed some existing Russia sanctions to ease pressure on global oil markets during the Iran war. The Senate bill would pull in the opposite direction, and the tension between the two is not resolved anywhere in the text. The bill’s sponsors want pressure on Moscow; the president wants cheap fuel at home. Graham’s bill is now parked at the intersection of both.
For India and China, the threat may matter more than the law. China is the world’s largest buyer of Russian crude; India is second. A permanent tariff threat, written into statute and named for a dead senator who made it his cause, changes the calculation for every tanker of Russian oil they load. Even if the tariffs never bite, the uncertainty is the point. Graham’s last weapon, like most of the weapons he championed, works best when it is aimed.
Whether it fires depends on a president who spent the campaign saying sanctions force everyone away from the US and who has spent his second term taking them off as quickly as he puts them on. The bill may pass. It may even be signed. But the man who wanted it most is gone, and the enforcement will be left to the man who made him wait for it.