Perhaps the most interesting angle to attempted Trump assassin Ryan Routh's recent history in his Ukraine connection. We documented that when he went to Ukraine to recruit for its International Legion in 2022 he was a Western mainstream media darling for a time, having been quoted on behalf of the cause to get more foreign fighters thrown into the battle against Russia by a who's who of major media sources from FT to Newsweek to the NY Times.
But when he arrived in Ukraine, according to these media reports, the 58-year old Routh himself was considered too old to fight alongside the Ukrainian army. "So plan B," Routh described to one outlet, "was to come to Kiev and promote the idea of many others coming to join the International Legion. We need thousands of people here to fight alongside Ukrainians."
"There are about 190 countries on our planet, and if the governments are not officially sending soldiers here, then we civilians should pick up this torch and make it happen," he described. He had told Newsweek in a video interview from Ukraine that the war with Russia was as simple as "good vs. evil" and essentially the same as good guys and bad guys in the Hollywood movies Americans grew up with. It was not a gray conflict, he described, but "black and white".
In March of 2022, just a month into the Russian invasion, he tweeted that everyone around the globe should be willing to volunteer and "fight and die" in Ukraine. Still, much of his time was reportedly spent in a hotel room in the far western city of Lviv.