THE UKRAINE LINK IN A PLOT TO KILL TRUMP. It is remarkable how little we know about the two 2024 attempts on President Donald Trump’s life. We don’t know much about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot Trump in the ear during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Nor do we know much about Ryan Routh, the 59-year-old former construction worker who lay in wait allegedly hoping to shoot Trump at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, golf course just a couple of months later on Sept. 15.
But we learned something big about Routh in a court filing from prosecutors Tuesday. What we learned was that Routh allegedly hoped to obtain a shoulder-fired rocket from Ukraine with which he would shoot down Trump’s 757 private jet.
In August 2024, according to prosecutors, Routh communicated online with an associate whom he “believed to be a Ukrainian with access to military weapons,” according to the court filing. The filing does not say who that “associate” was — was it a U.S. law enforcement agent posing as someone who could procure weapons, or was it actually a Ukrainian, perhaps someone with a connection to the war? Was it someone else? There’s no answer in the court papers.
In any event, Routh, communicating via the encrypted app Signal, asked the associate to send him a rocket-propelled grenade or a Stinger anti-aircraft missile. The two discussed price and shipping methods. Then Routh told the associate why he wanted the weapons: “I need equipment so that Trump cannot get elected.” The problem, for Routh, was that he could not just go to the hardware store and buy something to shoot down a 757. “Going to the local store for such an item is impossible,” Routh wrote to the associate. “However, you are at war so those items lost and destroyed daily — one missing would not be noticed. Do you think Trump will be good for Ukraine?????”
Just to be clear, Routh sent the associate a photo of Trump’s jet, writing, “Trump’s plane, he gets on and off daily.” And just in case his associate missed the intent, when Routh mentioned the failed Butler assassination attempt, Routh wrote, “I wish.”
We knew that Routh was deeply interested in the Ukraine war. Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he posted on X, “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE.” In the summer of 2022, Routh went to Kyiv, where he tried to get involved with the foreign fighters who had come to the country. He failed. “[Routh] reportedly contacted Ukraine’s International Legion on a regular basis with ideas described by one Ukrainian soldier as ‘nonsensical’ and ‘delusional,’” the BBC reported.
In 2023, Routh reportedly took his pro-Ukraine case to Washington, where he did an interview with the New York Times. Routh told the paper that “he was seeking recruits for Ukraine from among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. He said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest.”
Routh never got anything going in his effort to support Ukraine in the war against Russia. His own part in the cause, apparently, would be to kill Trump to prevent him from becoming president again.
But Routh eventually decided he could not get a rocket to shoot down Trump. So he got a military-grade SKS rifle. And then he tried to get a bigger gun. From the court filing: “Around the same time he was trying to get his hands on rocket and missile launchers from Ukraine, Routh explored another means of killing President Trump by researching and attempting to purchase a .50 caliber sniper rifle from a gun dealer in the Fort Pierce area. This .50 caliber rifle would have been an even more destructive and powerful version of the rifle he already obtained.”
There is much more to learn about the case. One person who wants to know more is Trump, whose attention was caught by the fact that after Routh’s arrest, police found he had 17 cellphones, along with three computers and three tablets. “That’s a lot of cellphones, and a couple of them had some strange markings on them,” Trump said at the White House this week. “So yes, I want to find out.”