U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker goes silent on Ukraine despite previous dogged support, following Trump’s attacks on its president

From combined media reports

After President Donald Trump’s vicious televised attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent shockwaves around the world, one longtime defender of Ukraine remained notably silent: Mississippi’s U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker.

As the March 5, 2025, edition of the Mississippi Free Press reported, Wicker, who is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has silenced his support for Ukraine since Trump halted aid to the country, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the outlet’s reporters.

MFP reporter Heather Harrison wrote that Wicker’s office “has rejected repeated requests for comment from the Mississippi Free Press since Trump’s Feb. 28 Oval Office blowup with Zelenskyy, despite telling this reporter to ‘call me any time’ for an interview at his campaign victory party last November.”

Harrison added: “Shortly after Trump kicked Zelenskyy out of the White House, Wicker removed a post he had made on X that morning that included a photo of him shaking hands with Zelenskyy.”

Wicker had previously told reporters in Washington, D.C., that he would remain silent on Ukraine, despite having been an outspoken supporter of the U.S. ally.

Harrison noted that during a Feb. 18 interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, Wicker was particularly outspoken about his support for Ukraine and his opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he described as “a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.”

Harrison wrote that MFP’s efforts to reach Wicker included multiple calls and emails to spokesperson Dirk Vande-Beek and others that were either ignored or prompted referrals to quotes on Wicker’s website that did not address the issues in question.

After Trump paused U.S. aid to Ukraine, Harrison wrote, she reached out to Wicker’s offices in Washington, D.C., Gulfport, Miss., and Hernando, Miss., but no one answered the phone in D.C. or Gulfport and a spokesperson at the Hernando office told her to call the D.C. office. When she began to explain that she had already tried that unsuccessfully, the spokesperson hung up, Harrison wrote.

A day after the MFP article, on March 6, the New York Times reported that Wicker was among a group of influential Republicans who “have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.” Others remaining silent or asking not to be quoted by name included fired federal workers worried about losing their homes, university presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear if they got singled out, and chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses but were wary of being targeted, the newspaper reported.

“Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man,” Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller wrote.

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government and coauthor of the book How Democracies Die, told Bumiller that with so many Americans “changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.”

Wicker, Bumiller wrote, had “told Mr. Zelensky in a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel last week that he was there with other senators ‘as a show of support.’ But after Mr. Trump’s confrontation with Mr. Zelensky later that day, Mr. Wicker took down a social media post showing him shaking hands with the Ukrainian leader.”

Bumiller also reported that “more than a half-dozen Republican defense hawks in the Senate -- not a group usually shy about communicating its views -- declined to comment for this article or did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Ukraine or why other Republicans were not speaking out.”

The outlet Mississippi Today also published an article on March 6 that raised the issue of Wicker’s silence, noting that the senator had told a meeting of European leaders in 2022, “The free world deserves better than this modern-day Adolf Hitler. If Vladimir Putin’s recent words and deeds have a haunting familiarity, it is because they are directly out of that Nazi madman’s notebook.”

Wicker, whom Mississippi Today reporter Adam Ganucheau described as “the eternal friend of Ukraine, the steadfast defender of America’s interests in Europe and beyond, the foreign policy wonk who knows the biggest threats to our nation and to the rest of the world run through Moscow — has gone underground since the Oval Office explosion on Feb. 28.” Ganucheau asked: “What will it take for Wicker, one of America’s most powerful leaders on the international stage, who took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ to stand up to the president on behalf of his country and the world?”

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Image: Roger Wicker (Haiyun Jiang/NYT)