Do viral screenshots prove that U.S. taxpayers paid $411,634.00 for Senator Lindsey Graham's hotel stay in Kyiv, Ukraine, in May 2025? No, that's not true: His name is not linked to the spending documented in the images. The Department of State told Lead Stories that the screenshot of the agency's government contract in Ukraine had nothing to do with congressional travel.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on June 3, 2025. It opened:
$411,634.00 for Lindsey Graham to stay in a hotel in Ukraine.
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
On the same day, the claim was boosted (archived here) on by the social platform's owner, tech billionaire Elon Musk. The entry he reposted included a video capturing not only Republican Senator Graham (archived here) but also his Democratic counterpart, Senator Richard Blumenthal (archived here), also seen visiting Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy (archived here) on May 30, 2025.
The screenshots from the viral posts reviewed in this fact check corresponded with this entry (archived here) on USAspending.gov. It showed a recent government contract awarded by the Department of State. The recipient's address in Ukraine matched Hilton Kyiv (archived here), and the contract's code was consistent with lodging. Yet, the publicly available information about the contract did not explicitly identify either Graham or Blumenthal as persons whose hotel stays were covered by it. Furthermore, the entry displayed a note saying that "this award has not been linked to any federal account," which suggested either a data error or a reporting backlog. An overview of the recipient (archived here) showed that the entity has contracts that don't only cover a timeframe intersecting with the two senators' trip.
On June 5, 2025, a spokesperson for the Department of State told Lead Stories via email that the federal agency can't discuss the nature of this specific arrangement due to security concerns but added:
However, we can say that this funding is not related to Congressional travel.
Earlier, on June 4, 2025, Graham called (archived here) the claim "fake news" and "more BS", writing on X:
This isn't a travel expense report. It's a monthly contract between the State Department for U.S. diplomats in a war zone -- nothing to do with my trip.
Congressional travel may be funded through a variety of sources, and some of them -- such as private organizations or foreign governments -- have to be disclosed in detail under Senate disclosure rules. Those reports are published here, but as of this writing, no entry matched the trips of the two senators to Kyiv in late May of 2025.
Lead Stories additionally contacted the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal but did not receive a response.
Read more
Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning claims about the Russia-Ukraine war can be found here.
Articles about current events in the United States are here.
