What the Would-Be Trump Assassin Was Really up to in Ukraine

An avowed Swedish drug dealer coming from his vacation in Ibiza was drinking Johnny Walker Red, Brits with skinny jeans and notepads gabbed about “being like Orwell,” a Moldovan and an Israeli called their friends on speaker phone to yell about “being off to war,” and an overweight Norwegian man told me he was ready for the trenches.

Despite some of those characters, Ukrainian military and intelligence sources have told me time and again that foreigners, especially those with NATO-standard skills, have been invaluable at times throughout the war. “Foreign volunteers generally did a great job,” one Ukrainian military commander told me in 2023, but “they are not used to these conditions.”

A man like Routh, with no training for war whatsoever, was nothing but a bona-fide headache for the Ukrainians—he was, before and after his stint in Ukraine, hardly an intelligence asset capable of a presidential assassination.