Over the weekend, the Secret Service apparently prevented another assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump — this one by an American man in his late 50s. One thing we know about alleged assassin Ryan Routh is that he traveled to Ukraine in 2022 and feels strongly that Ukraine’s victory over Russia is essential.
What does that tell us about him? As a U.S. Army infantry officer, I deployed twice to Afghanistan — once from 2007 to 2008, and the second time from 2010 to 2011. I helped train Afghans and conducted frequent patrols. This gave me a strong baseline of skills, and a fair bit of experience with violence. Enough to know that I don’t care to be a part of violence if it can be avoided.
Still, Russia’s invasion compelled me (as it apparently did Trump’s would-be assassin) to travel to Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022. The first trip, to train civilians, was with two other veterans. I returned alone in 2023 to train soldiers.
This is why it doesn’t surprise me that a person unbalanced enough to attempt to assassinate a president could have been in Ukraine in 2022. It was a unique space. During the first few months, bureaucratic processes governing the crossing of borders operated normally while Russia was racing through the south of the country and trying (and failing) to seize Kyiv and Kharkiv.
A guy carrying five suitcases stuffed with drones and body armor at the Polish border? No problem, go right in. Aging and paunchy man headed for Kyiv with nothing but a suitcase who “wants to help” at the Romanian border? Let me stamp your passport — into Ukraine you go. Any and all help was welcome, regardless of whether the help in question was of any real utility.
In March 2022, Lviv, the city in Western Ukraine, was like Mos Eisley, the savage fictional town which Luke Skywalker travels to in “Star Wars.” It was a city of 800,000 pre-invasion. And somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million people were in Lviv at that time, as Ukrainian civilians surged westward to safety.
If you wanted to travel to Kharkiv or Mykolaiv from Lviv and had a U.S. passport, it was not difficult to arrange transport. Most people were traveling west, not east.
The people moving east from the U.S. to catch the war fell into a few groups: idealists, adventurers, opportunists, criminals and madmen. This is the famous Star Wars cantina scene. Perhaps it also bears a resemblance to Rick’s Café in “Casablanca.” That is an accurate representation of Ukraine in the war’s early days.
During my first trip to Ukraine, I ran into one dubious character while catching a flight to Poland at JFK Airport. He was in his 60s, loitering by the check-in counter. He’d seen Russia’s invasion on television and wanted to get to Kyiv. He explained to me, while some of my traveling companions were using the bathroom, that the airline wouldn’t let him fly because he had no passport.
I don’t think he was a bad guy. I told him about a place in Stamford, Conn., where he could get a passport expedited. He replied that he didn’t feel comfortable using trains.
Travel to Ukraine required a passport, money and the ability to organize. It also required a car, bus or train. Some who had no responsibilities or jobs (such as the mentally unwell), who wanted to help but could not take a train to Stamford, never made it out of the U.S. Those with more resources — the idle rich, or those motivated by some other purpose (opportunism, adventure, idealism, criminal activity) — were able to make it to Ukraine with very few restrictions on where they went or what they did while in the war-torn country.
It’s not easy or normal to lay one’s responsibilities aside and enter (or, in the case of a veteran, re-enter) a world of chaos, violence and uncertainty. And the sort of person who makes it to war is not normal or usual. It is good and useful for law enforcement agencies to keep track of the people who, when a war in another country that they feel affects them starts, drop everything to head toward the fighting.
This is not, however, because supporting Ukraine or any other national cause makes one suspect. Plenty of people like me supported (and support) Ukraine because it was the right thing to do, and also in America’s interests. If Russia wins, it will continue to wage wars against its neighbors. If it loses, it won’t.
All that notwithstanding, it is not normal to travel to a country under an invasion. Of course it’s worth taking a look at those who did, myself included.
But when doing so, one should establish the category that best describes such travelers. Are they idealists, adventurers, opportunists, criminals or madmen? Given his confused and counterproductive scheme to murder Donald Trump by crouching in the bushes wielding an AK-style rifle while the former president golfed, Routh seems to have been of the last group.
In that sense, Routh’s affinity for Ukraine cannot be said to have motivated him to hazard an attack on Trump, the man for whom he voted in 2016. The essence of madness is that it is unreasonable and illogical. Ultimately, only the mad understand why they do what they do; the rationale behind their actions is sensible only to them.
I wasn’t mad to travel to Ukraine to help. Most of the other people who showed up there hoping to pitch in were good people. Some of them, though, were a few cards short of a full deck.
There are many arguments for why the governments of European countries and of the U.S. should be doing more to help Ukraine; the well-meaning assistance of individuals can only go so far. Moreover, when you let people in, you don’t know who they are. Many American and European supporters of Ukraine were there for good reasons, and did the right thing. A few weren’t.
Adrian Bonenberger is a writer and a veteran of the U.S. Army. He is a co-founder of American Veterans for Ukraine.