Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who was arrested Sunday in connection with what the FBI described as an attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump, had expressed the desire to fight and die in Ukraine.
Routh’s posts on social media site X revealed a penchant for violent rhetoric in the weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE,” he wrote.
On the messaging application Signal, Routh wrote that, “Civilians must change this war and prevent future wars,” as part of his profile bio. On WhatsApp, his bio read, “Each one of us must do our part daily in the smallest steps help support human rights, freedom and democracy; we each must help the chinese.”
Routh, a former roofing contractor from Greensboro, North Carolina, was interviewed by The New York Times in 2023 for an article about Americans volunteering to aid the war effort in Ukraine. Routh, who had no military experience, said he had traveled to the country after Russia’s invasion and wanted to recruit Afghan soldiers to fight there.
In a telephone interview with the Times in 2023, when Routh was in Washington, he spoke with a self-assurance of a seasoned diplomat who thought his plans to support Ukraine’s war effort were sure to succeed. But he appeared to have little patience for anyone who got in his way. When an American foreign fighter seemed to talk down to him in a Facebook message he shared with the Times, Routh said, “He needs to be shot.”
In the interview, Routh said he was in Washington to meet with the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission “for two hours” to help push for more support for Ukraine. The commission is led by members of Congress and staffed by congressional aides. It is influential on matters of democracy and security and has been vocal in supporting Ukraine.
Routh also said he was seeking recruits for Ukraine from among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. He said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest.
“We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said.
It is not clear whether Routh followed through, but one former Afghan soldier said he had been contacted and was interested in fighting if it meant leaving Iran, where he was living illegally.
A man with the same name and similar age to that of Routh was arrested in 2002 in Greensboro, North Carolina, after barricading himself inside a building with a fully automatic weapon, according to the Greensboro News & Record newspaper.
The newspaper said the man was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and possession of a fully automatic machine gun. It is not clear how the charges were resolved.
It is not clear whether Routh, a lean man with reddish-brown hair who wore American flag clothing in one of his profile pictures, fired any shots before leaving the scene Sunday, according to the Secret Service.
In a series of posts on X in 2020, Routh expressed admiration for former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, then a Democratic presidential candidate, saying “she will tirelessly negotiate peace deals in Syria, Afghanistan, and all turmoil zones.”
At some point over the past several years, Routh moved to Hawaii, where a man with his name ran a small business.
In a May 2020 post, he invited Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, to Hawaii for a vacation and offered to act as “ambassador and liaison” to resolve disputes between the two nations.
When deputies stopped Routh on Interstate 95 after the Trump incident, Routh appeared calm, did not ask why he was being detained and “was not armed when we took him out of the car,” Sheriff William D. Snyder of Martin County told a local station, WPTV.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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