Ryan Routh, pictured at a rally in central Kyiv in April, 2022, travelled to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale attack in February, 2022, saying he was drawn to the 'evil against good' nature of the conflict.Efrem Lukatsky/The Associated Press
Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old accused of planning to assassinate Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, often declared on social media and elsewhere that he wanted to “help Ukraine.”
With his alleged actions – creeping into the bushes with an AK-47 assault rifle while the former U.S. president was playing golf – Mr. Routh has not only added more drama to an already unprecedented U.S. election, he has dealt a potentially damaging blow to the cause he purported to care so much about.
The suspected assassination attempt could well give Mr. Trump a boost in the polls. It may also further harden Mr. Trump’s opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine, which is crucial to the country’s ability to fend off the Russian invasion.
As much as he wanted one, Mr. Routh never gained any official association with Ukraine. He travelled to the country shortly after Russia launched its full-scale attack in February, 2022, saying he was drawn to the “evil against good” nature of the conflict.
His initial desire was to take up arms and fight the Russians. Mr. Routh arrived in Ukraine in the wake of a call from President Volodymyr Zelensky for foreigners to “come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.”
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Thousands of would-be warriors, many of them deeply troubled, headed to Ukraine in those first months of the war. A 2022 Globe and Mail investigation found that the ranks of the volunteer International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine contained dangerous criminals and con artists, as well as fighters with openly far-right ideologies.
While some of the volunteers were career soldiers keen to join a cause they believed in, many had little or no combat experience. Those in the Ukrainian security services charged with trying to sort out the useful fighters from the potentially dangerous drifters came to refer to the legion as “the Zoo.” (Two years later, the situation inside the legion is said to be greatly improved.)
Mr. Routh was one of the drifters – no combat experience, though a man by that name did have multiple convictions for weapons offences, including a 2002 arrest in North Carolina after leading police on a vehicle chase before holing himself up in a building with a machine gun. The Greensboro News & Record reported that a Mr. Routh had also been convicted, in separate incidents, of possession of a concealed weapon, possession of stolen property and a hit and run. The man reportedly received a suspended sentence or probation each time.
After arriving in Ukraine, Mr. Routh told interviewers from the Financial Times and Newsweek Romania that he was rejected by the Ukrainian military because of his age and lack of military experience.
He turned, unsolicited, to trying to help the country recruit more foreign volunteers to the fight. He established an organization called Fight For Ukraine (one of several with similar names), which posted advice on its website about how to join the International Legion alongside rambling calls to arms.
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“The most amazing way to show selflessness and generosity and the character of moral fabric of ourselves is to go directly to Ukraine and stand with them for freedom, humanity and basic human rights,” reads one post on the Fight For Ukraine website. The page advises would-be fighters not to ask for permission from embassies, but to just head to Ukraine and to contact Mr. Routh once they were in the country.
None of that was authorized by any official Ukrainian structure. A source in the International League who knew Mr. Routh said he never worked as a volunteer in the army and was told by officials to stop attempting to recruit on behalf of the army. The Globe is not naming the source because they were not authorized to publicly comment on Mr. Routh’s case.
Donald Bowser, Ukraine country lead for GIST Research, an advisory company focused on governance in conflict, said he frequently saw Mr. Routh standing on Kyiv’s main Independence Square in 2022 wearing a sandwich board, trying to charge volunteers for his “service” of helping them connect with a military unit. Mr. Bowser said Mr. Routh was reported by other volunteers for fraud and harassment to the Ukrainian police, and eventually left the country.
“A lot of people with illnesses were drawn to Ukraine,” Mr. Bowser said. “It’s time for policy makers to understand that you have these people who have no understanding of the Ukraine conflict, but who have worked themselves up into this fanaticism over Ukraine. You’re going to have terrorists that are pro-Ukrainian.”
The fact that Mr. Routh’s attempts to “help” were rejected by the Ukrainians at every turn likely won’t matter much to isolationist Republicans eager to end Washington’s support for Kyiv. “He’s obsessed with the Ukraine war, which is funded by the U.S.,” was how Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene described the Mr. Routh in a post on X. The comment was gleefully picked up by Russian state media.
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Ukrainians were already nervous about Mr. Trump’s potential return to the White House. During his previous term as president, Mr. Trump often seemed in awe of Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin. He also briefly withheld U.S. military aid to Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to coerce Mr. Zelensky into launching an investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who eventually defeated Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.
Four years later, Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are neck-and-neck in the race to succeed Mr. Biden. Ms. Harris is Mr. Biden’s Vice-President, and is expected to continue his policy of providing escalating military support to Ukraine.
Mr. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, recently laid out his understanding of Mr. Trump’s plan for ending the war in Ukraine. It involved allowing Russia to keep the roughly 20 per cent of Ukraine that it now occupies, while declaring Ukraine a neutral state that would never be allowed to join the NATO military alliance – in short, giving Mr. Putin almost everything he wants.
It’s a future that very few Ukrainians would accept, and Mr. Zelensky’s government has been working hard to convince those around Mr. Trump that he should stand with their country, rather than Mr. Putin, if he returns to the White House.
That task became that much harder after Sunday – thanks to the actions of an erratic man who said he wanted to help save Ukraine.