Ukraine confirms contact with Trump shooter

The American who allegedly tried to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had visited Kiev and offered his services to Ukraine, but was rejected, the Ukrainian military said on Monday.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was arrested on Sunday after the US Secret Service spotted him at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. His social media posts and a self-published book claimed involvement with the Ukrainian military.

On Monday, the Ukrainian Land Forces Command confirmed to CNN that Routh had been in touch with them, but described his ideas as “delusional” and denied having accepted his services at any point.

“He was offering us large numbers of recruits from different countries but it was obvious to us his offers were not realistic,” Aleksandr Shaguri, a military spokesman, told CNN. “We didn’t even answer, there was nothing to answer to. He was never part of the Legion and didn’t cooperate with us in any way.”

The best way to describe Routh’s message was “delusional ideas,” Shaguri told the outlet.

In the summer of 2022, Routh visited Ukraine and gave multiple interviews to Western media outlets, presenting himself as a liaison to the government in Kiev and seeking to enlist pro-US fighters from Afghanistan for the Ukrainian cause. In one such interview, Routh told Newsweek Romania journalist Remus Cernea he was recruiting people for the International Legion of Ukraine.

“I viewed him as an idealistic innocent genuine person, without any murderous instinct,” Cernea told CNN after Routh was identified as the Florida gunman. 

The Romanian reporter recalled that Routh saw the Russia-Ukraine conflict as “black and white… good versus evil,” and that in another interview he described Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “terrorist” who “needs to be ended.” 

In multiple posts on Twitter – now X – that year, Routh wrote that he was willing to die for Ukraine and that “we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground.” His account has since been scrubbed, however.

In 2023, Routh self-published a 291-page book titled ‘Ukraine’s Unwinnable War’, which at one point advocates killing Trump over his decision to exit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

“You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal,” he wrote, referring to the fact that the man he called “brainless and a “retarded child” was elected US president in 2016. “But I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologize.”

“No one here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection,” he added. 

Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Trump said the gunman “believed the rhetoric of [President Joe] Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and he acted on it,” pointing to their statements that the former president and Republican presidential candidate is a “threat to democracy” that must be stopped.