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Ryan Routh, who has been named in numerous media reports as a suspect in the alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Sunday, was one of thousands of foreign volunteers who headed to Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
But when he arrived in the Polish border town of Medyka, he turned up at the Ukrainian International Legion office and was turned away. “They said, ‘You’re 56, you’re old, you have no experience,’” Raut told the Financial Times last year from Hawaii. “So why don’t you recruit people and coordinate their activities?”
On Sunday, law enforcement officers a man was detained who they said was hiding in bushes bordering the Trump International Golf Club in Florida. In the bushes, they found an AK-47-style rifle with a scope, two backpacks, and a GoPro camera. The man was widely identified as Raut by U.S. and international media.
The 58-year-old man's previous views and political activities are currently being investigated for possible motives for the attack on the US presidential candidate.
After being turned away by Ukrainian forces, Raut, who had previously worked in construction and lived in Hawaii, then went to Kyiv “to coordinate volunteers”, pitching a tent on the capital's Maidan.
There, often wearing a star-spangled red, white and blue T-shirt, he hung on a plywood stand the flags of each country whose civilian volunteers fought on Ukraine's side.
“My original goal was to promote the foreign fighters and the foreigners who were there, sacrificing their time, energy and lives to support Ukraine,” he said. “I wanted to put flags in the yard for them.”
He also posted leaflets in Kyiv's central square offering $1,200 to foreigners who would take up arms against Russia. The contact information on the leaflets was his own, and military recruiters at the time said he had no official connection to Ukraine's growing international legion.
Tens of thousands of foreigners flocked to Ukraine in the first months of the Russian invasion after President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly appealed to “citizens of the world, friends of Ukraine, peace and democracy” to help his country fight a much larger and better-equipped enemy.
But most of those who came to Kyiv were not battle-hardened former NATO soldiers; they were like Raus, with no military experience and no idea how to navigate a foreign country.
Raut was also rejected by a unit of the International Legion affiliated with Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency, said a person who knew him and had previous ties to the unit. The person described Raut as “a little too much” for them and the Legion, citing his unpredictable behavior.
The Ukrainian International Legion confirmed on Monday that “American citizen Ryan Routt never served in the International Legion of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, [and] has nothing to do with the unit.”
In an interview with the FT, Rout described a series of clashes with Ukrainian police, city officials and others over the location of a makeshift memorial and tent on the Maidan.
“The police destroyed it. [the plywood memorial] and said, 'You can't do that here,'” Raut said. He then moved the memorial to a nearby site and also assembled a makeshift “Flags of the Fallen” memorial of paper flags honoring Ukrainians killed in the war, which remains there to this day.
The American also told the FT that he was working to get thousands of Afghan soldiers who fled the country after the Taliban seized power in 2021 to fight on Kyiv’s side. “We have 20,000 Afghan soldiers sitting around doing nothing,” Rout said, who could be recruited to fight “so that this war doesn’t drag on for years.”
The FT was unable to independently verify the claim at the time. A person who knew Raus in Kyiv said on Monday that he had been running a “database” of Afghan soldiers, but his plan was deemed far-fetched and was rejected by officials at Ukraine's International Legion.
When asked why he volunteered for Ukraine, Raut said at the time: “For me, it's pretty much an obvious answer. I'm pretty puzzled that not everyone is there.”
Additional reporting by Izobel Koshiv in Kyiv