On a cold January morning earlier this year in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, a man in his 60s, wearing a black suit and flanked by two massive soldiers holding Russian and Chechen flags, delivered a fiery speech to thousands of troops about to be deployed to Ukraine.
“Chechens are the best people. People who want to live in peace,” said the man as he stared into a sea of camouflage, machine guns, and armored cars marked with the Russian Army Z. “But now is the time to do your job.”
This man wasn’t a general, a politician, or even a Russian national. He was a Florida native named Scott Ritter whose home in upstate New York was raided by the F.B.I. on August 7 as part of an investigation into Americans who have connections to Russian state media.
Although no charges against Ritter have been officially brought, the warrant for the raid cited potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law that requires U.S. citizens to disclose their activities in support of foreign governments. Federal prosecutors recently levied sanctions against the Kremlin-owned media companies RT and Sputnik. And just last week, prosecutors announced that Russians had paid Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company, $10 million to spread pro-Kremlin messages through conservative social-media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin.
“I am not in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” Ritter recently told reporters outside his home. “Hopefully by executing their search warrant and taking the materials that they did, they will rapidly reach that conclusion.”
Since 2019, when RT published Ritter’s opinion piece arguing that potential Russian aggression is just a pretext for the White House to justify inflating its defense budget, Ritter has become Putin’s prized propaganda asset.
According to Ritter, Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained in Russia for 17 months, is a spy, and the March 2022 mass killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces in Bucha—confirmed by video, satellite, and forensic evidence—was actually a war crime committed by Ukraine itself.
He advises the West to stop poking the “Russian Bear,” lest they want a nuclear war on their hands. Preventing one is the reason he’s trying to bring “an alternative point of view” to the American public, he claims. “For me, being in Russia is a mission,” Ritter said in a one-on-one, prime-time interview on Russia’s top-rated TV talk show. “If I don’t achieve my goals, hundreds of millions of people will die.”
According to Ritter, the March 2022 mass killing of Ukrainian civilians by Russian forces in Bucha—confirmed by video, satellite, and forensic evidence—was actually a war crime committed by Ukraine itself.
Few things delight Moscow as much as a U.S. passport holder justifying Russian repression and “special military operations.” In Ritter, the Kremlin has found something invaluable: expertise.
In 1980, Ritter served as a lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force, focusing on critical events, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War. In 1991, Ritter was appointed chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, where he was tasked with identifying and dismantling the country’s stockpile of chemical weapons after the Gulf War.
A weapons inspector isn’t typically a public role, but Ritter made the most of it, writing op-eds in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and publishing more than 10 books on American foreign policy in the Middle East, including Endgame: Solving the Iraq Crisis (2002) and Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change (2006).
In 1998, Ritter resigned as a U.N. weapons inspector, publicly criticizing the U.N. and the U.S. for failing to take strong action against Iraq’s non-cooperation, which he believed rendered the inspection program ineffective and merely an “illusion.”
After resigning from the U.N., Ritter began receiving invitations to speak at Hollywood fundraisers. In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, he remembered one event where Barbra Streisand pulled him aside for a 40-minute conversation, and later, Warren Beatty invited him to his home for chili and an extended political discussion.
Then, in 2001, Ritter was involved in two incidents where he contacted undercover police who were posing as under-age girls online and agreed to meet them at fast-food parking lots with the intent of exposing himself. He was arrested during one of these encounters, but charges were dismissed on the condition that he undergo intensive counseling.
A judge later sealed the records, and the reasons behind the dismissal remain unclear. In 2009, Ritter was again caught having lewd interactions with undercover police officers posing as under-age girls in Internet chat rooms, which led to a three-year stint in state prison, a loss of income, and banishment from the media and academic circles where he had been a fixture. (Ritter did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
Barbra Streisand pulled him aside for a 40-minute conversation, and later, Warren Beatty invited him to his home for chili and an extended political discussion.
If you’re someone like Ritter, whose social-media bio reads “an experienced military and geopolitical analyst with a proven track record of accuracy and integrity,” but whose Google results include the words “sex offender,” you can still get a hero’s welcome in Russia—as long as you say the right things.
When he visits the country, it immediately makes the news. The Russian edition of his book Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika is published by the nation’s largest newspaper. A landmark bookstore in St. Petersburg staged a public talk for him, during which, a local newspaper reported, “the audience gave the author a long, enthusiastic round of applause and didn’t want to let Mr. Ritter go.”
Ritter vehemently denies the charge that he is a master propagandist. In a sense, he’s right. While Sputnik and RT promote Ritter’s articles, his English-language show, Ask the Inspector, which is banned on YouTube, has a modest viewership. On X, his key platform for addressing a Western audience, most of his posts get a couple of hundred likes. On Telegram, Ritter’s videos get tens of thousands of views, but the platform is not particularly popular in the West.
Unlike, say, Edward Snowden, or the influencers hired by Tenet, whose YouTube videos have millions of views, Ritter is neither viral, popular, nor influential in the English-speaking world. In other words, he’s not any of the things he desperately wants to be. He’s Russia’s resident American, validating every atrocity the country commits.
If Moscow had a Statue of Liberty—a “Lady Tyranny” rising above a sea of concrete apartment blocks—its golden plaque would certainly read, “Give me your criminals, your corrupt. Your loner maniacs yearning to breathe fame.”
Andrew Ryvkin is a screenwriter, journalist, and Russian-affairs specialist
