Last year I was working on a story about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine. The story was about people who were not allowed near the battlefield in a US-led war and yet were fighting on the front lines against Russia, with access to weapons and military equipment.
Among the people I interviewed: Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man the FBI is investigating for what it calls an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday.
I was introduced to Mr. Routh through a former colleague and friend from Kabul, Najim Rahim. Through the strange connection between fighters at the end of one war and the beginning of another, he had heard about Mr. Routh from a source in Iran, a former Afghan special operations soldier who was trying to leave Iran to fight in Ukraine.
Mr. Routh, who had spent some time in Ukraine trying to drum up support for the war, was looking for recruits among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. So the former Afghan soldier thought Mr. Routh could bring him to the Ukrainian front. (Anything, even war, was preferable to living conditions in Iran for Afghans after the Taliban recaptured Kabul in August 2021.)
There were some complications. Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., said he had never fought in Ukraine himself: He was too old and had no military experience.
But like many foreign volunteers who arrived at the Ukrainian border in the first months of the war, he was eager to leave his old life behind for something far more exciting and to make a name for himself.
“In my opinion, everyone should be there to support the Ukrainians,” he told me over the phone, his voice urgent, exasperated and a little suspicious.
When I spoke to Mr. Routh last March, he had drawn up a list of hundreds of Afghans scattered between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan whom he wanted to bring to Ukraine. Mr. Routh told one of them: “I’m just a civilian.”
My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He was in Washington, he said, and had scheduled a two-hour meeting with some members of Congress about Ukraine. (It is unclear whether that meeting took place.)
By the time I hung up with Mr. Routh a few minutes later, it was clear he was completely overwhelmed.
He talked about buying corrupt officials, forging passports and doing everything in his power to bring his Afghan cadres to Ukraine, but he had no concrete means of achieving his goals. He even talked about organizing a US military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees ready to fight.
I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but Mr. Routh’s tone of voice said otherwise. He was going to support Ukraine’s war effort no matter what.
Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell into obscurity again. Until Sunday.
Najim Rahim contribution to the report.
