This weekend, the name Ryan Routh was spread all over the news. The 58-year-old resident of Hawaii had been arrested at a Donald Trump golf course in Florida after U.S. Secret Service agents spotted him with a gun, allegedly aimed in the direction of the former president. After a short altercation, Secret Service members swiftly arrested Routh, who went down without a fight.
After the incident, many reports and pictures started to emerge about Routh. A video surfaced from June 2022 in which he is in Kyiv on Independence Square, known as Maidan, claiming to be a recruiter for the International Legion, the volunteer unit of the Ukrainian military, filled with foreigners who wish to join the front lines in the fight against the Russian invasion. Routh, however, was in fact a little-known figure in Ukraine, but those who had made it to Kyiv during the war or were part of the network of foreign fighters and volunteers flooding into the country had the occasional run-in with him around Maidan.
What Routh’s exact activities were in Ukraine is not fully clear; all that’s known about his time there is that he mostly spent it hanging around the center of Kyiv. Routh had hung up a mural on Maidan, containing flags of all the foreigners who had come to Ukraine to fight. He allegedly had pitched a tent on the lawn of the square and had put up posters everywhere that included his phone number and email, requesting people who wanted to join the fight to contact him.
I got in touch with Routh through one of the posters he had spread around town. My reasons for contacting him were pretty specific. When I was in Kyiv in the summer of 2022 on a reporting trip, I had passed by the flag mural and noticed it included the red-white-black, two-star flag to represent the Syrians who were fighting in Ukraine. Having followed and researched the Syrian civil war for a decade, I knew that to the Syrian people this flag is generally not considered the national flag of the country but more a symbol of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The brutal, Russia-allied dictatorship in Damascus had destroyed the country during the war, killing hundreds of thousands and pushing millions into exile or poverty.
I texted the number on the poster with a short explanation and the suggestion that it would be better to replace the current flag with the green-white-black Syrian independence flag, revived by the vast majority of the Syrian people in 2011 as the flag of the Syrian revolution or “Free Syria,” if you will.
The number turned out to belong to Routh, who thanked me and said he would do his best to order one, a task that, in wartime Ukraine, was understandably easier said than done. A couple of months later, in October of that year, Routh suddenly reached out to me again. He had remembered our short exchange over the summer and had somehow got the impression I was a foreign volunteer fighting in Syria. When I made it clear over our text conversation that I was simply a reporter and a researcher who did a lot of work related to Ukraine, he came back with an odd request. He told me he would elaborate during a conversation on the phone.
When I spoke to him a bit later, he did not beat around the bush. He claimed to have over 200 Syrian military men who were ready to go to Ukraine and fight the Russians. What he needed help with, however, was getting them out of the country.
Routh was looking for advice and, clearly, contacts who could assist him in getting those people from Syria into a third country, and from there into the EU so they could cross into Ukraine. All I could offer him during that conversation was a brief explanation that it would be extremely hard to convince Polish or Romanian authorities to fly in hundreds of Syrian men with military experience based on a promise they would not stay but would instead cross into Ukraine. He did not seem to get the message.
Even though the story sounds wild, the idea of Syrians wanting to volunteer in Ukraine is not as far-fetched as it seems. Having been an ally to the Assad regime for many years, the Russians joined the Syrian battlefield in 2015. Their warplanes committed one massacre after another in rebel territory as they assisted advancing regime forces on the ground or just tried to break the spirits of Syrians trying to build a new life in the “liberated” areas of Syria. Schools, hospitals and markets were the prime targets of the Russian air force. President Vladimir Putin would later claim that many of the Russian military’s new weapons had been tested out in Syria. To many Syrians, Russia embodied an evil empire. Freedom over the Assad regime in Syria would not be possible without the demise of the Russian regime.
So when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there were a number of Syrian rebels expressing their wish to join the Ukrainian front, believing their years of experience fighting Russian war tactics could be of assistance to the Ukrainians. One of them was Suheil Muhammad Hammoud, better known as “Abu TOW.” Hammoud, a Free Syrian Army rebel from the north, has a credible claim of holding the record for most military vehicles destroyed by a single person. With his signature American-made TOW anti-tank missile, he had destroyed an estimated 140 Assad regime tanks, armored vehicles and other military targets. The day after the Ukraine invasion began, Hammoud wrote on Twitter (now X) in English: “How can I go to Ukraine and fight alongside the Ukrainian army Is there a way I’m ready.”
With this in the back of my mind, I kept engaged in the conversation with Routh. Even if I couldn’t be of much assistance to him, if his claims were true, at least it would make for an incredible story. But it became clear fairly quickly that things did not check out.
Wanting to know more about the Syrians Routh claimed to represent, I kept asking details about their background. Where were these men from? What factions did they fight for in the Syrian civil war? I assumed he was talking about Syrian rebels, but with hundreds of different rebel formations in the country — some good but others notoriously violent and corrupt — it was important to pin down this information. And last of all, why did these men want to join the front in Ukraine? Was it out of solidarity with Ukrainians, a shared hatred toward the Russian regime, or were they just expecting the pay to be good? I needed clarity on this last part because during our conversation, Routh kept mentioning the salary they would receive in Ukraine. According to him, the salaries were $2,000 a month for regular soldiers, $2,500 for officers, and $10,000 to the families should any of them perish on the battlefield. When I asked Routh who had agreed to these amounts and who would be paying them, he did not give a straight answer. Routh was also unable to answer other basic questions like how he got in touch with the Syrians and how he — a 58-year-old American with zero military experience and, as became apparent, no background knowledge of Syria — managed to gain their trust. Most important of all, how was he even able to communicate with them, since it was clear he did not speak Arabic and it was unlikely many of them spoke English? Routh was not able to answer any of those questions.
After the phone call, I concluded the story had too many inconsistencies to pursue and decided to drop the whole thing. But after only a couple of days, Routh reached out again. He shared a PDF file detailing his plan that, according to him, contained many of the answers I was seeking. Only when I read the file did the story become even more suspicious.
Routh claimed that the 250 Syrians were almost all former members of the Republican Guard and had received American training. These first claims already seemed very unlikely. The Republican Guard is one of the most loyal formations of the Syrian military, packed with Alawite soldiers and officers, the community from which the Assad family hails, and defections from the Guard were minimal throughout the war. Aside from that, the Americans trained only a small number of Syrian rebels. Throughout the war, the CIA made sure to properly vet any rebel who would end up receiving training in Qatar. Only several hundred to a couple thousand made the cut; Routh’s claim that he had gathered hundreds of Syrians who had both these backgrounds was highly unlikely.
He next claimed that some of the Syrians had already had experience abroad, fighting as Turkish foot soldiers in Libya or Azerbaijan. This claim could have been plausible. Thousands of Syrians did indeed go to both those battlefields. However, since these Syrians were sent there to do Turkey’s geopolitical bidding, this would make them members of the Syrian National Army (SNA), a fighting force holed up on the Turkish border, which is mostly kept in place to serve as a buffer between Turkey, the Assad regime and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The whole thing read as if the primary source was Wikipedia.
This is where it got even more suspicious. Routh’s plan was to get these 250 men to Manbij, a city in SDF territory, and from there to either Turkey or to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, from where they could fly to Poland or Moldova to cross the border into Ukraine. It’s important to note that the SNA and SDF have basically been sworn enemies for the better part of the past 10 years. The idea of the SDF letting hundreds of enemy combatants pass through their territory was as likely as those same Syrians being able to reach Ukraine by going through Belarus or Russia itself. It was not happening.
It was clear this whole story was written down by someone who knew next to nothing about Syria, its conflicts, and the different territorial and political dynamics between the warring sides. Routh did not have the background knowledge of Syria; he did not have the contacts in the SDF, Turkey, the U.S. or Poland to make a crossing happen; and on top of that, he admitted he did not even have the gear to equip those Syrians should they, by some miracle, reach Ukraine after all.
I decided to do some research on Routh but could not find much. I did, however, find a New York Times article published in March 2023 in which Routh was making the same claim, only this time it was not a couple hundred Syrians but a couple thousand Afghans whom he wanted to get into Ukraine. As remarkable as it sounds, the New York Times managed to contact an Afghan Routh claimed to represent.
Even though I tried, I was never able to identify and get hold of any of the Syrians Routh claimed to have represented and couldn’t verify if they ever existed. Maybe it was all made up, or maybe there were Syrians willing to go. He might have promised a lot of things to people who clearly never reached Ukraine. He never mentioned the Syrians in public again, but he kept holding on to the Afghan story. Based on his posts on what was then Twitter, he would later try to get his Afghans into Taiwan to form an international battalion there. And when that did not go anywhere, he would even try to get them signed up to the Haitian police.
Why does this matter? With the suspected assassination attempt of Trump this weekend, Routh and his claims have come to the forefront again. Some of the most die-hard Trump supporters are doing their best to tie Routh to the Ukrainian war effort, claiming he was a member of the International Legion and even has ties to the Ukrainian military or government, in an attempt to discredit Ukrainians and those who have traveled to the country to support them. One by one, however, Routh’s claims are strongly disputed by others. Members of the International Legion have firmly denied that Routh had any links with their unit, let alone that he was a recruiter. His stories about Afghans and Syrians were never verified, and it can be said for certain they never actually resulted in anything.
Based on the limited interactions I had with him, Routh did not come off as a scammer. Not once did he ask me or anyone in my network for financial support. He was also not one to brag, being fairly honest that he did not have any military experience and had not fought in Ukraine. Routh gave the impression that he did believe, or wanted to believe, the stories he told me. He struck me as someone who was sincere in wanting to help Ukraine, but his ideas on how to do this were just unrealistic, if not absurd.
It should be obvious that anyone who was as invested in Ukraine as he was would be no fan of Trump. But whatever he was planning to do at that golf course in Florida shocked even those of us who had encountered him in the past. Sadly, I believe his desire to help Ukraine and his beliefs about how to achieve that led him down a dark path, culminating in the dramatic arrest we witnessed this past Sunday.
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