What the Would-Be Trump Assassin Was Really up to in Ukraine

As Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border in February 2022, Ryan Routh pledged to do everything he could to stop Vladimir Putin. “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE,” he posted on Twitter soon after the invasion. By the spring, he was in Kyiv, posing as a recruiter for the International Legion—a brigade of foreign fighters fighting with the Ukrainian military. A visible and flamboyant presence in St. Michael’s Square, he was also a frequent interview subject, talking to, among others, The New York Times and Romanian Newsweek. (“This conflict is definitely black and white,” Routh told the latter. “This is about good vs evil.”) 

In the wake of his arrest for allegedly planning to assassinate Donald Trump at his South Florida golf course on Sunday, Routh’s connections to Ukraine have become fodder for right-wing conspiracy theories. Some have gone as far as to claim that Routh is some sort of Lee Harvey Oswald figure or even a Ukrainian Manchurian candidate, with connections leading from St. Michael’s Square straight to the three-letter agencies who surely ordered another hit against Trump.

“We know little so far,” wrote Edward Snowden from Russia, before speculating that Routh’s “personal and public participation in military activity in Ukraine” must mean that it would be “hard to imagine [the] White House’s agencies can claim zero contact.”

“Something of an Oswald vibe, here,” wrote Snowden. “Congress should get answers.” 

Alex Jones, the conspiracy-addled talk-radio host whose lies recently drove him to bankruptcy, has spent the last two days raving about Routh’s alleged connections to NATO, the CIA, and the deep state. Meanwhile, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, suggested that Routh was sent by the Ukrainian government to kill Trump.  

Many of Routh’s tweets suggest a self-aggrandizing—and likely mentally ill—person who was trying to portray himself as having played a much bigger role in the conflict than he did. In one notable post, he attempted to bargain with Elon Musk to help him attack Russia.

“I would like to buy a rocket from you,” posted Routh. “I wish to load it with a warhead for Putin’s Black Sea mansion bunker to end him.” The rocket didn’t have to be new, he added helpfully: “It can be old and used as not returning.”

Intelligence agencies have been known to recruit ex-soldiers into their ranks, or operators with a past in wheeling and dealing abroad. But Routh had no military experience and was turned down for service by Ukraine because of his age. (He does, however, have experience with firearms: He was charged for illegally possessing a “fully automatic machine gun” in 2002 and was known to “get in armed confrontations with police,” per the officer who arrested him then.) 

Routh isn’t a Manchurian candidate. He wasn’t even a former soldier—or, for that matter, someone involved even tangentially in recruitment for the war in Ukraine. Instead, he was one of the many deranged grifters who showed up in Kyiv to take advantage of the moment for their own self-aggrandizement. 

“The word across actual useful volunteer networks is how fucking terrible this guy behaved, how he treated everybody like shit,” Kevin Leach, a veteran of the Canadian military and the Kyiv-based director of Sabre Training Advisory Group, an organization made up of mostly former NATO military members that have schooled over 3,600 Ukrainian soldiers in combat, told me. 

Leach, who is familiar with Routh’s reputation from the many foreign volunteers in his social circles, says the would-be assassin was known as unhinged.  

“You could see he’s a fucking weirdo; he’s going around with a sign taped to his chest, giving people some number to recruit to the International Legion. And he’s doing this in Kyiv,” said Leach. “The guy was clearly not moored to reality.”

At its zenith, the International Legion—the military unit created by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration shortly after the start of the war, attracted as many as approximately 20,000 volunteers after Ukraine called on veterans of other countries to officially enlist in the fight. But very soon, it became a headache: The unit was mired with difficulties, bad recruits, accusations of being “cannon-fodder,” and obvious language troubles between soldiers.

While some of the foreign fighters flooding into Ukraine were legitimate veterans of the global “war on terror” or had pasts in elite special forces units, the majority were thrill-seeking nobodies; former addicts seeking to turn a new leaf; criminals fleeing their countries; and glory hunters, like the photogenic son of RFK Jr. (who didn’t last very long). 

Routh, however, never served in the International Legion, nor did he ever end up fighting for Ukraine in any capacity. Instead, he told The New York Times that he was recruiting foreign fighters for the Ukrainian cause—something he was reportedly not very good at. Routh talked a great deal about bringing Afghan soldiers to Ukraine—often via convoluted and illegal means—but apparently accomplished very little and perhaps nothing at all. There is, in fact, no evidence that Routh successfully recruited a single soldier for the Ukrainian cause. 

Another ex-Marine and American volunteer, who has been training Ukrainians and working on helping the country’s drone capabilities since May 2022, said men like Routh were a fixture of the early stages of the war.

“Absolute [Live Action Role-Playing] delusional, nutjob,” said the ex-Marine. Because the conflict is easily accessible from Europe, it “appears to attract delusional narcissists” like Routh.

He’s not wrong: One Canadian man was caught allegedly faking his entire wartime experiences from the comforts of Ontario, while American veteran James Vasquez was infamously outed for his stolen-valor exploits in Ukraine, all in pursuit of financial gain.

“Anyone that has worked here for a while knows that, and has met at least one if not more of these kinds of people,” said the ex-Marine. “This guy seems to clearly have been one of those types.”

I was on a Ukrainian railcar entering the country a few days after Russian bombs and paratroopers started dropping from the sky in February 2022. The menagerie of bizarre characters taking up the seats were far from romantic heroes, let alone professional soldiers.

An avowed Swedish drug dealer coming from his vacation in Ibiza was drinking Johnny Walker Red, Brits with skinny jeans and notepads gabbed about “being like Orwell,” a Moldovan and an Israeli called their friends on speaker phone to yell about “being off to war,” and an overweight Norwegian man told me he was ready for the trenches.

Despite some of those characters, Ukrainian military and intelligence sources have told me time and again that foreigners, especially those with NATO-standard skills, have been invaluable at times throughout the war. “Foreign volunteers generally did a great job,” one Ukrainian military commander told me in 2023, but “they are not used to these conditions.”

A man like Routh, with no training for war whatsoever, was nothing but a bona-fide headache for the Ukrainians—he was, before and after his stint in Ukraine, hardly an intelligence asset capable of a presidential assassination.

Yesterday, even the Azov 12th Special Operations Brigade, with its own checkered history and links to neo-Nazism, denounced Routh, who had allegedly shown up at one of their rallies after the war began. “We would like to officially state that Ryan Wesley Routh has no connection to Azov and has never had any connection to Azov,” it said in a statement, rebutting what it says has fast become Russian propaganda. “The peaceful demonstration he attended was open and anyone could join it.”

Routh wouldn’t have been of any interest to Azov: The controversial unit, my sources in the brigade told me in March 2022, was only after men with NATO-standard skills and multiple combat tours. Azov was, at the time, fiercely fighting in the coastal and southern city of Mariupol. According to those sources, anybody without that kind of soldierly pedigree would have been quickly made a “corpse.”

Leach described to me how men like Routh in Ukraine were nothing like an Oswald, a former serviceman and crack shot. Instead, they were serial liars who permanently damaged the reputation of Westerners in Ukraine.

“Guys who lied about military backgrounds, dopeheads trying to score medical opiates, sexpats, self-aggrandizing social media personalities, you name it,” Leach said. “It creates barriers for people like us trying to get real work done.”