Russian President Vladimir Putin “is a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed,” says U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican.
The comment comes at a time when the leader of his own party, President Donald Trump, is seeking a cozier relationship with the Russian dictator while alienating and harshly criticizing U.S. allies, including Ukraine.
Wicker made the remark in a Feb. 18 interview with CNN’s Manu Raju.
Days earlier, the senator expressed “surprise” and said he was “disturbed” and “puzzled” after Trump-appointed U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that returning to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was “unrealistic.” Wicker voted to confirm Hegseth to the role on Jan. 24; all Democrats and three other Republicans voted against Hegseth, including U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
During that interview, Wicker also rejected the idea that the Trump administration could negotiate an end to the war with Russia without Ukraine’s leaders present. “I don’t know what the scheme is,” he said, saying Ukraine needs to be part of the negotiations for a “fair result.”
Wicker has emerged as one of the highest-ranking Republicans to speak forcefully in favor of supporting Ukraine even as the Trump administration has steadily pulled back from the strong support the U.S. showed the embattled eastern European nation under President Joe Biden.
Wicker ‘Disturbed’ and ‘Puzzled’ by Hegseth’s Remarks
Politico’s Politics Bureau Chief Jonathan Martin interviewed Sen. Roger Wicker for the Politicio Pub after Hegseth remarked at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Feb. 12 that he did not think Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO but that he hoped for the end of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops,” Hegseth said at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Feb. 12 in Brussels, Belgium.
Hegseth later seemed to backtrack slightly, saying that “everything is on the table” when it comes to negotiating the end of the war on Ukraine.
“I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made or what concessions are not made,” Hegseth said on Feb. 13 at a press conference in Brussels, Belgium, after the NATO Ministers of Defense meeting.
Wicker said he disagreed with Hegseth’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine, explaining that while it may not be possible for Ukraine to join NATO presently, its allies in the U.S. and Europe should be paving a path for a treaty to agree to defend “victim(s) of aggression whether it be through a group of 10 or eventually NATO.”
The Group of Nine was an alliance of nine European countries that formed in 1965 and dissolved in 1969 after the Soviet Union and several of its allies invaded Czechoslovakia.
“(Ukraine joining NATO) may not happen this year, or in five years or 10 years, but in the meantime, can’t peace-loving strong allies of the United States in Europe join together somehow and say, ‘Yes, we will defend after this treaty is written and agreed to, we will defend someone who’s a victim of aggression’?” Wicker said during his Politico Pub interview at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14.
He also said he does not want Russia to rejoin the G8, an international political organization of eight countries that including the U.S. and Russia from 1997 to 2014. The other countries in the G8 suspended Russia from the group in 2014 for annexing Crimea in southern Ukraine. The group then became the G7 and Russia withdrew itself permanently in 2017.
Putin Can’t Be Trusted, Wicker Says
Speaking on the U.S. Senate floor on Feb. 11, Sen. Wicker described brutal beatings that Russian prison guards administered to Ukrainian prisoners of war. He described guards who “intentionally beat” Ukrainian POWs on the same parts of their bodies daily so that wounds would never heal; at least one person died of sepsis because of the repeated beatings, he said.
“If Vladimir Putin comes to the negotiating table and agrees to a cease-fire, we need to bear in mind that he is the gentleman who has countenanced this outrage that I have barely been able to speak about today. Any negotiations we have with the Russians and with the current leadership need to be done in light of the facts as outlined in this independent report,” Wicker said on Feb. 11.
Martin mentioned during the Politico interview that Wicker sounded “skeptical” that Russia would “abide by any agreement” when he spoke on the U.S. Senate floor.
“Well, they certainly haven’t kept their end of the bargain when the Soviet Union fell apart and the international community was trying to talk the leadership of Ukraine at that time to give up a nuclear weapon, which they did based on a solemn promise by the United States of America,” Wicker told Martin on Feb. 14.
In 1994, Ukraine was the third-largest nuclear power in the world when it agreed to transfer its nuclear weapons to Russia to dismantle as part of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S., the United Kingdom and Russia agreed in exchange to guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty and security.
While the Republican leader on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee is staunchly in support of Ukraine, Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia when he spoke to reporters on Feb. 18, 2025. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, in the largest and deadliest attack in Europe since World War II, after previously invading Ukraine to annex Crimea in 2014.
“Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump said of Ukraine. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
Trump also called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” on Feb. 19 after Zelenskyy said Trump was living in a Russian-made “disinformation space.”
Though Trump insinuated that Zelenskyy is a dictator for suspending elections, Ukraine’s constitution forbids elections from taking place while the country is under martial law, as it has been since the 2022 invasion.
The Mississippi Free Press asked Wicker’s office for a response to Trump’s remarks about Ukraine and Zelenskyy but did not receive a response by press time.