New information is constantly emerging about Ryan Wesley Ruth, 58, who was arrested for the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
According to an exclusive new report from the Wall Street Journal, Ruth was so belligerent and hostile during his years of pro-Ukraine activism that other Americans who knew him flagged to U.S. authorities that something was wrong.
Ryan Wesley Ruth was taken into custody in Florida on Sunday after Secret Service agents spotted and opened fire on a man pointing a rifle through the fence of a West Palm Beach club where Trump was playing golf. The man fled in a black Nissan but quickly ran into a roadblock.
In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Ruth traveled to Kiev and Mariupol, hoping to join the fight. There, he began to raise concerns among those he came into contact with. Chelsea Walsh, a nurse who had several encounters with Ruth in Kiev, said the threats of violence worried her so much that she raised her concerns with a Customs and Border Protection agent in June 2022 as she was returning to Dulles Airport in Washington.
Top of the list of… predators
Walsh said she spent an hour talking to an officer, explaining that Ruth was one of the most dangerous Americans she had met during her month-and-a-half stint in Ukraine. She showed the officer a notebook listing more than a dozen names of Americans and others whose actions had bothered her, she said. Under the heading “General Predatory Behavior (or Antisocial Traits)” were four names. Ruth was at the top of the list.
When the officer noticed there were multiple names, she responded, “Of all the people in there, Ryan Ruth should be the one you should be most concerned about,” Walsh told the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reviewed her notebook and confirmed the list of names. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment from the Journal.
Ruth’s behavior has also been flagged to the FBI in the past, though not in relation to Ukraine. A tipster told the FBI in 2019 that Ruth owned a firearm despite having criminal convictions against him, but when questioned later, he did not verify the information. The FBI forwarded the information to authorities in Honolulu, where Ruth was living at the time, and closed the investigation.
His Ukraine-related activities have unsettled many who have come into contact with him. According to the WSJ report, he was known among volunteer aid groups in Ukraine as “rogue” or “dangerous,” said Sarah Adams, a former CIA officer who helped run a network that linked 50 aid groups to share information and coordinate volunteers. He claimed to be working with the Ukrainian government to recruit foreign fighters, but in fact there was no official contact with the Zelenskyi regime, she said.
It should be noted that the International Legion of Ukraine, which coordinates foreign volunteers, denied having had any cooperation with Ruth in recruiting fighters.
Your messages on Signal and WhatsApp
“My name is Ryan Ruth from the US,” he wrote in a message to Afghans on Signal and WhatsApp, claiming to have “convinced the Ukrainian military to accept Afghan fighters on a trial basis.” After being alerted to these messages in early June, other aid groups banned him from their own Signal groups and reported his activities to the State Department.
“A lot of people were trying to get him out of business or at least keep people from falling for his scams,” Adams said.
In Kiev, Mr. Routh dyed his hair blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and often wore a red, white and blue American flag T-shirt. He put up posters in Kiev urging foreigners looking for ways to help Ukraine to send him a message. A Frenchman who traveled to Ukraine to fight said Mr. Routh helped him secure a position in a Ukrainian army unit. But he also spoke of how angry he was with Mr. Trump over his attitude toward Ukraine.