The Ryan Routh I Knew

I considered Ryan Routh a kind of friend. He was a passionate and idealistic individual, who was prepared to fight for what he believed in. We rarely spoke about U.S. politics, and I cannot remember Donald Trump’s name ever coming up in our conversations.
For all these reasons I was shocked when my editor called me and told me what Ryan had done.
I had just arrived in Bucharest from Kharkiv. It was a long trip—almost 40 hours of traveling on trains and buses—and I was very tired from the few weeks I spent in Ukraine, where the constant alarms and bombings make it almost impossible to sleep.
Sabin Orcan, the owner and editorial director of Newsweek Romania, called me and said: “Have you seen this? Have you seen what’s happened?”
A huge, huge sadness came over me. If all this is true, and Ryan did what they are saying he did, then he misunderstood everything, and he was a different person than the one I had met in Kyiv over two years ago.
I met Ryan during my first trip to Kyiv in June 2022. He was standing in Maidan Square in the center of the city, along with two other people who were involved in organizing humanitarian support for Ukraine, and he told me that he was trying to convince people to join the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine.
I asked him for an interview and he said yes, and in the brief conversation we had he came across as a person who is idealistic, an almost hippie-type of man, someone who has their principles and is open to fighting for them.
Sometimes he became emotional, as you can see in our interview, but in the circumstances I found this understandable. I was very empathetic. I felt like I understood him.
I think he wanted to go to Ukraine to fight as a soldier, but he had no military experience and so wasn’t able to join the International Legion himself. I didn’t consider him a violent person, but I believed he would have fought for Ukraine if he was allowed to do so.
Over the next two and a half years we spoke a number of times on WhatsApp. I sent him the article I had written about him and he was very happy. He sent me some things about what he was doing in Ukraine.
We even met up on two other occasions: Once in Autumn 2022 and then again in August 2023.
But, unfortunately, the last time I saw him it seemed to me that he wasn’t in a very good situation. He was having financial problems and was considering going back to the U.S. He seemed desperate; he was angry at the level of support being sent to Ukraine.
While he thought that Ukraine had enough to resist the Russian invasion, he believed this was not nearly enough to help win the war.
Maybe he thought that Trump is not a friend of Ukraine. Maybe he thought that Trump winning the election would mean that aid would stop. Maybe he thought Trump would force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. He’d probably been reading the media reports on Trump’s vision for Ukraine, and about Harris’s vision.
But what he did is bad for this cause. He was immature, and he wasn’t able to understand that violence is never the solution in a democracy. Violence is a threat to democracy, every democracy. And I’m amazed that Ryan, this person I felt I knew, didn’t understand that simple fact.
Every time there is an extreme act of violence like this it hurts the cause. Because for people who don’t know enough about Ukraine, they will see this and think: “Oh, this guy is pro-Ukraine and he tried to kill one of the candidates for the presidency. So this must mean that pro-Ukrainians are extremists.”
Ryan himself was willing to sacrifice himself for Ukraine. Every foreigner who comes there is probably willing to sacrifice themselves. They’re open to the idea that they might die, because you never know, maybe the next missile will have your name on it.
What he tried to do was come to Ukraine and convince other people to defend it. This is a noble act. His ideas in regard to Ukraine were good and just, ethically speaking. And this is why it’s a paradoxical situation, because he did something which is the opposite.
In Ukraine you meet a lot of interesting people. There’s a story at every corner. Ryan was like so many people I met in Ukraine. He saw the war as black and white: An evil country trying to destroy its neighbor.
But he never struck me as anything more than an idealist, albeit a very passionate one. I never considered him capable of violence. I never thought he would do something like this.
Remus Cernea is a human rights and animal rights activist, and a war correspondent in Ukraine.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
As told to Hugh Cameron.
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