"Senator McCain died. He was good at hating Russia, and he is the symbol of modern, openly anti-Russian thinking.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Late US Sen. John McCain has always been in favor of a powerful United States, calling Russia its enemy, but unlike many politicians he was honest in his expressions, Russian parliament upper house's International Affairs Committee member Oleg Morozov said Sunday.
"Senator McCain died. He was good at hating Russia, and he is the symbol of modern, openly anti-Russian thinking: Russia cannot be anything other than hostile. A good Russia is a dead Russia," the lawmaker wrote on Facebook.
McCain, in fact, declared that Russia was incorrigible, the politician said.
"We, no matter how much we tried to be well received, no matter how much we bowed, no matter how much we swore to love the West, which we did all the 90s, we will never be good. We are enemies forever! This is McCain's logic, and it is good at its transparency," Morozov explained.
The Russian lawmaker gave final credits to McCain's straightforwardness.
"The enemy died. Honor his honest hostility, honest hatred and intransigence. Others act crookedly. This one says what he thinks. He taught us to better understand ourselves and the United States," the parliamentarian concluded.
The US senator from Arizona died on Sunday at the age of 81. McCain throughout the year struggled with an aggressive form of brain cancer. On Friday, the senator's relatives announced that he had stopped treatment. The six-term US senator and former prisoner of war in Vietnam was diagnosed with the disease in 2017.
McCain was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1982, and, after two serving two terms, was elected to the US Senate in 1986. Since 2015, he worked as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The politician ran as the Republican Party's presidential nominee in the 2008 US election against then-Senator Barack Obama, who won the vote.