Lingering question: Did Ukaine have some role in an attempt to kill Trump?

Peloni:  What did Ukraine know, what did they do with that knowledge, and most importantly, why is there such a hushed silence surrounding these questions?

By Monica Showalter | Am Thinker | April 11, 2025

Ryan Routh.  By Martin County Sheriff’s Office, Public Domain

In a age of lightning-fast information and leaks over secrets, it’s remarkable how quiet things are on who may have been behind the two known assassination attempts on President Trump last summer, one of which almost succeeded.

We still don’t know.

But Byron York at the Washington Examiner thinks the Ukraine angle of Ryan Routh’s second attempt in Florida is worth a closer look.

He writes:

It is remarkable how little we know about the two 2024 attempts on President Donald Trump’s life. We don’t know much about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who shot Trump in the ear during a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Nor do we know much about Ryan Routh, the 59-year-old former construction worker who lay in wait allegedly hoping to shoot Trump at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, golf course just a couple of months later on Sept. 15.

But we learned something big about Routh in a court filing from prosecutors Tuesday. What we learned was that Routh allegedly hoped to obtain a shoulder-fired rocket from Ukraine with which he would shoot down Trump’s 757 private jet.

The narration went like this:

In August 2024, according to prosecutors, Routh communicated online with an associate whom he “believed to be a Ukrainian with access to military weapons,” according to the court filing. The filing does not say who that “associate” was — was it a U.S. law enforcement agent posing as someone who could procure weapons, or was it actually a Ukrainian, perhaps someone with a connection to the war? Was it someone else? There’s no answer in the court papers.

In any event, Routh, communicating via the encrypted app Signal, asked the associate to send him a rocket-propelled grenade or a Stinger anti-aircraft missile. The two discussed price and shipping methods. Then Routh told the associate why he wanted the weapons: “I need equipment so that Trump cannot get elected.” The problem, for Routh, was that he could not just go to the hardware store and buy something to shoot down a 757. “Going to the local store for such an item is impossible,” Routh wrote to the associate. “However, you are at war so those items lost and destroyed daily — one missing would not be noticed. Do you think Trump will be good for Ukraine?????”

You can imagine that President Trump might be interested in knowing, too.

Might this have explained the major spat between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Vladimir Zelensky, who not only was apparently a close cooperator in the first impeachment of President Trump, he also openly campaigned against Trump in Pennsylvania in the election of 2024.

Now we have the story of the miserable Routh, who spent time in Ukraine looking for a shoulder-fired missile with which to kill Trump, not even concealing his intention, and apparently not getting it because the person he was talking to was not the Ukrainian he thought he was.

I would assume this was a sting with lawmen on the other end, but the story takes strange twists and turns, so it could be anything.

Did Ukraine know that this guy was looking for weapons with which to kill Trump? If they did, did they tell appropriate law enforcement authorities, or at least U.S. diplomats or perhaps Trump, given the animosity of the Biden administration to Trump? Routh, like the previous would-be assassin, could have succeeded. He only failed in his evil mission because of an alert Secret Service agent who could see something funny in the bushes as Routh hid there, gun in hand, then an alert passerby saw him rushing away and, snapped a photo. In a chance piece of luck, the cops scooped him up. But what if he had succeeded?

Was Routh a lone wolf, or were he, the deep state, and the Ukrainians all in it together?

It’s odd how nothing is coming out about this. Imagine what Trump was thinking as he met with Zelensky in the White House several weeks ago — he betrayed no emotion in that direction, demonstrating nerves of steel.

But as we watch Trump close in on China with the tariff wars, it’s significant that he’s made friendly gestures to Ukraine’s enemy, Russia. This would be part of a well-known Trump masterplan to align the U.S. with Russia to check China.

This is going on now:

At the same time, there’s this backstory, one that needs a lot more explanation, including some questions for Zelensky:

Because if it’s true that Ukraine had at least some complicity in the attempt to kill Trump, it’s hard to think of a stranger war or alliance, where the ally tries to murder the leader of the country that’s supporting him. I ccan’t think of any examples from history like that — usually it’s the client state that has a leader that gets killed or overthrown, not the leading state.

Any questions as to why Trump has his reasons for moving to normalize Putin into the company of normal nations?

I think it was La Rouchefoucauld who once said that suspicion justifies deceit. If that’s the case, Ukraine’s suspicion of Trump is now leading to Trump having some appropriate suspicion of them — and a reason to dump them and their interests. Why should Trump be doing Ukraine any favors, particularly as he looks to break China’s grip on the global economic order through some kind of entente with Russia?

It may be the most incredible high-stakes geopolitical chess we have ever seen if the facts ever get out.

Image: Screen shot from Amuse video, on X