The suspect in the apparent assassination attempt on U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump was seen as a problem by some soldiers and volunteers in Ukraine, where he had offered to recruit Afghans into the Ukrainian army, a former soldier said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.
Suspect Ryan Routh, 58, who was arrested 40 minutes after Sunday’s incident at one of the former president’s golf courses in Florida, has publicly shown his support for Ukraine and spent time in Kiev after Russia launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“He was disappointed… he thought he was the only one who knew how to help the Ukrainians,” Evelyn Aschenbrenner, a former Foreign Legion soldier in Ukraine, said in a Zoom interview with Reuters from Lviv.
Reuters verified documents confirming Aschenbrenner’s military service in the Ukrainian forces. The U.S. citizen said she and Routh served in a bureaucratic role with the Legion for two years starting in March 2022.
According to the Ukrainian government, Routh did not fight in the country in the Foreign Legion or any other military unit.
“We have seen from the news that the suspect has publicly supported Ukraine, but there are hundreds of millions of people in the United States who support Ukraine and clearly this is a diverse group of individuals,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said in an interview with reporters Tuesday.
Screenshots shared with Reuters by Aschenbrenner show messages demanding that Routh stop trying to recruit on behalf of Ukraine because he was acting outside official channels. He responded aggressively.
Aschenbrenner said everyone who came into contact with Routh was angered by his behavior and came to believe he posed a potential problem for the Ukrainian cause.
Source: Terra
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