‘Ticking time bomb’: Those who raised suspicions about Trump suspect question if enough was done

The more Chelsea Walsh talked to the eccentric fellow American who seemed to pop up in every square and cobblestone street of Ukraine’s capital, the more she got creeped out.

Walsh was in Kyiv as a nurse and aid worker in the early days of the war in Ukraine. Ryan Routh was there to recruit foreign soldiers to fight the Russians. But Walsh never saw him make much progress and instead watched him grow increasingly angry and unhinged, kicking a panhandler, threatening to burn down a music studio that slighted him and speaking of his own children with seething hatred.

Just as troubling, she said, was Routh’s obsessive, oddly specific plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, describing the various explosives, poisons and cross-border maneuvers that Routh would employ “to kill him in his sleep.”

“Ryan Routh is a ticking time bomb,” she recalled telling U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in an hourlong interview upon returning to the United States at Dulles International Airport near Washington in June 2022. She says she later repeated her concerns in separate tips to both the FBI and Interpol, the international policing group.

“There is one person you need to watch,” she said. “And that is Ryan Routh.”

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