"After meeting with Zelenskyy, my friend and one of Russia’s most relentless opponents in America, Senator Lindsey Graham, who was returning to the United States, suddenly passed away. At such a moment, the first thought that comes to my mind is whether they gave him Russian tea on his way back to America," Georgia’s third president Mikheil Saakashvili wrote.

In his message, Saakashvili recalled Lindsey Graham’s visits to Georgia and wrote that after the Georgian Dream came to power, the senator never returned to Georgia.

"Lindsey was a close friend of my closest friend, John McCain. In 2008, he called the aggression against Georgia a declaration of war against the entire free world. He visited Georgia many times.

I remember once we planned to tour Georgia together, and while still in Tbilisi he warned us that in recent years he had developed a fear of heights and water. First, we flew by helicopter to Svaneti, then to Batumi. I took him to the top floor of the unfinished Sheraton building, and later McCain and I forced him into the rough waters of the Black Sea. We were brought back to the residence by scooters. Despite his declared fears, he followed us everywhere.

Lindsey helped me with advice as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when the ‘Georgian Dream’ lobby was trying to blame me and our military for the 2008 war at the Hague Court.

When a conflict emerged between John McCain and Trump in 2016, Lindsey sided with Trump and became very close to him. He was Trump’s trusted person in the Senate.

I last spoke with Graham shortly before his return to Georgia, in the U.S. capital. Of course, during the period of ‘Georgian Dream,’ he never again set foot in Georgia.

The photo, which was widely published in the American media, shows us making wine from grapes in Kvareli. Now neither McCain nor Graham is alive, and the vineyard plot in Kvareli has also been taken away and left devastated.

I would like to express my sincere condolences to the family of my friend Lindsey Graham for this extremely untimely loss," Saakashvili wrote.