Did Russia Poison Lindsey Graham? What the Pattern Tells Us

COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating

Russia repeatedly has been accused of poisoning its enemies. The historical record offers a useful test before drawing conclusions about this case.

My inbox filled up within hours of the news. The question was consistent: “Did the Russians poison Lindsey Graham?”

I don’t know. Did anyone poison Lindsey Graham? Nobody outside a toxicology lab knows yet, and anyone telling you otherwise right now is guessing. What I can do, as I’ve tried to do with Putin’s alleged deaths, with Havana Syndrome, and with speculation about the U.S. being on the verge of civil war, is look at evidence that is available to us. In this case, the first thing to ask regarding the Russia theory is to examine how Moscow actually behaves when it decides to kill someone; and then ask whether this fits.

It doesn’t. Not yet, anyway. Here’s why.

The Pattern, Not the Rumor

Senator Graham was in Ukraine days before his death, pushing a Russian sanctions bill he said the White House would back. He returned home to the U.S., and died on Saturday night. His staff described it as a brief and sudden illness. Public speculation immediately jumped to “Russia did this.”

I’d ask people to slow down and look at the record.

Russia has a long, well-documented history of poisoning political enemies and defectors. The Soviet Union set up its secret “Special Office” poison laboratory in 1921, and targeted a host of victims. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, other secret laboratories operated inside Russia. The labs created various deadly toxins to be used on individual targets.

The intended targets generally were defectors or people who challenged the regime.

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was living in London when he was stabbed in 1978 with an umbrella that delivered a tiny pellet of deadly ricin.

Two days prior, another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, was stabbed with poison while on the Paris Metro. The primary suspects were Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence services. 

READ MORE: Havana Syndrome and the ‘Moscow Signal’: A Sobering Red Flag

That is the telling pattern. When Moscow was caught or suspected of poisoning someone, the operation typically did not look like a light switch flipping off. It looked like a slow unraveling.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned with Novichok on their own doorstep in Salisbury in 2018. They didn’t collapse instantly. They were found slumped on a park bench hours later, and it took investigators days to trace the contamination back to a door handle. Sergei spent weeks in critical care before he pulled through.

Alexei Navalny fell ill on a domestic flight in 2020, and was rushed through a chaotic medical fight to Berlin. He survived, and later died inside a Russian penal colony. 

Alexander Litvinenko took three weeks to die from polonium poisoning in 2006, and Moscow let the world watch every day of it. That was the point. A visible, drawn-out death is a message to the next defector thinking about talking. A man simply dropping dead sends no message at all;  it just generates rumors, which is the opposite of what an assassination is supposed to accomplish.

I made a version of this same argument about Havana Syndrome. The “red flag” there wasn’t that the Russians denied everything. The flag was the consistent pattern of cases. If the pattern makes Havana Syndrome plausible, the absence of pattern makes instant-death-by-Kremlin, on current facts, a harder sell.

Detached Analysis, Again

When Green Beret Matt Livelsberger died in Las Vegas inside a burning Cybertruck, people believed he had been murdered. But suspicion doesn’t equal truth, even when someone dies in spectacular fashion. The same discipline applies here in reverse: a dramatic death doesn’t equal a dramatic cause. Grief and shock want an explanation with a villain attached. Sometimes the villain is real. Sometimes a 70-year-old man with a brutal travel schedule has a catastrophic medical event, and the timing is coincidence dressed up as conspiracy because we badly want it to mean something.

Putin’s operatives have shown that they’ll take enormous operational risk and wait years for a payoff. They have not established a public pattern of killing high-profile American officials, with or without using the kind of slow-motion menace that’s their actual signature.

The Caveat

None of this proves Graham wasn’t poisoned. I don’t have his toxicology report, and neither does anyone posting about it today. Fast-acting agents exist. It’s possible. But don’t skip the diagnostic and jump straight to the conclusion.

The diagnostic, in this case, is simple. Russia has been accused of poisoning dissidents before. Those operations share recurring characteristics: target selection, timing, messaging, delivery methods, and often a willingness to let attribution serve as part of the punishment. In the Skripal, Navalny, and Litvinenko cases, whoever poisoned them went for a slow kill, a visible kill, a kill meant to be read as a message.

The publicly known facts surrounding Lindsey Graham’s death, at least so far, do not obviously align with that pattern.

If that changes when the medical findings come in, I’ll say so. Until then, I’d rather tell readers we don’t know, and this doesn’t fit, than hand them a comforting villain a toxicology report might not support.

Susan Katz Keating is the publisher and editor in chief at Soldier of Fortune.