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When Ryan Routh spoke to Semafor on March 7, 2023, he was frustrated with the Ukrainian government for which he’d traveled around the world to support.
The Ukrainians, he complained, were being too rigid about admitting foreign soldiers of dubious qualifications, including a group of Afghan commandos who were facing skepticism and bureaucratic roadblocks in Kyiv.
“Ukraine is very often hard to work with. Many foreign soldiers leave after a week in Ukraine or must move from unit to unit to find a place they are respected and appreciated,” he told Semafor. He’d been “yelled at” every time he suggested they tap Afghan commandos. “They’re afraid that anybody and everybody is a Russian spy,” he said with frustration.
Now a man widely reported to be Routh, 58, is in custody for what the FBI described as an apparent attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
When Semafor talked to him, Routh was one of a wave of American volunteers in Ukraine, the self-appointed director of a group he’d started called the International Volunteer Center. He was, even by the standards of that frantic moment, a bit over the top, a Ukrainian involved in the effort told us at the time. But he was also, they said, authentically involved in the efforts to bring in foreign troops, and we quoted him in a story about the Afghan fighters.
On X, he frantically tweeted at President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with his ideas — for instance, “to use Independence Park to create a tent city of all the foreigners here in support to get thousands more foreign civilians to come and support Ukraine.” Zelenskyy did not appear to respond.
Routh appears at 2:50 in this Semafor video:
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Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said Routh’s “AK-47 style weapon with a scope” had been recovered at the scene, according to the Associated Press.
Routh was not the focus of our 2023 story, and we spoke with him for less than half an hour. He said he had spent 5 months in Ukraine working on his center, and when we spoke to him he was working to find a house in Pakistan to temporarily lodge Afghans hoping to fight in Ukraine. “The International legion recently tightened the hiring standard and has been firing many volunteer soldiers,” he said. But he’d recently gotten the good news that one Afghan soldier, Reza, had been accepted by the Ukrainians.
Our conversations painted a picture of a man who had committed his life to the struggle for Ukraine — but whose own allies also viewed him with skepticism.
“I have had partners meeting with [the Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue not one single visa for any of these soldiers,” he complained. He’d pitched his idea widely, he said, but “got yelled at by most everyone.”
When we spoke to him, he had transferred his frustration to the American government, and traveled to Washington to lobby.
“I am in Washington DC now to try and get some leadership here to help push the Ukrainians to take these soldiers,” he said. “It all hinges on the US partners here encouraging Ukraine to use these men or us merely convincing them to use them.”
Tanya Lukyanova interviewed Routh while she was a journalist at Semafor. She’s now a reporter for The Free Press.