Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump last weekend, was a “ticking time bomb,” says a woman who met him in Ukraine.
Chelsea Walsh worked as a nurse and aid worker in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war when she met Ryan Routh, who was there to recruit soldiers to fight for Kyiv.
According to a report in the Associated Press, Walsh saw Routh spiral into anger and unhinged behaviour as his efforts to recruit soldiers failed. Routh attacked a homeless person, threatened to burn down a music studio and spoke “of his own children with seething hatred.”
“Just as troubling, she said, was Routh’s obsessive, oddly specific plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, describing the various explosives, poisons and cross-border maneuvers that Routh would employ ‘to kill him in his sleep.’”
“Ryan was the kind of guy who would blow up a building on Tuesday, just because he felt like it,” Walsh said.
When she returned to the US, she told US Customs and Border Protection officials that Routh was a “ticking time bomb,” in an hour-long interview, in June 2022.
“There is one person you need to watch,” she claimed to have told officials.
Walsh said she received no follow-up to her tip.
“The authorities have definitely dropped the ball on this,” she told AP. “They were warned.”
A spokesman for the State Department said there is no record of any complaints about Routh.
Ryan Routh was arrested last Sunday, 15 September, after Secret Service agents foiled his assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Routh positioned himself at the perimeter fence of the Trump International West Palm Beach golf course with an SKS rifle and a GoPro camera. He was hundreds of meters from the former president when he was detected. After fleeing the scene, he was arrested on the Interstate.
In the week since his arrest, attention has focused on Routh’s time spent in Ukraine in support of the war effort against Russia. Routh was profiled in The New York Times for his recruiting work, which included attempts to bring Afghan fighters to Ukraine via Iran and Pakistan.
Routh also published a 300-page book revealing his motivations and mindset.
Ukraine’s Unwinnable War was self-published in February 2023 via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Written in a rambling, semi-grammatical style, the book focuses on Routh’s experiences in Ukraine as a volunteer, but also details his “solutions” for the war and America’s political problems.
As well as calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin and Belarus’s premier Lukashenko, Routh argues in favour of nuclear war with Russia and asks Iran to kill Donald Trump for scuppering the Obama-era nuclear deal.
“I must take part of the blame for the retarded child that we elected for our next president that ended up being brainless, but I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologize. You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error.”
Records suggest Routh made 19 donations to Democratic candidates since 2019.
He was well known to law enforcement, with a string of offences to his name, including “possession of a weapon of mass destruction” in 2002.
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