Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh

Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh (born approximately 1997, Olympia, Washington) was a member of Atomwaffen Division's Washington state cell who, in 2018, accompanied AWD leader Kaleb Cole on a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the two received paramilitary training from the Russian Imperial Movement's Partizan camp. He was subsequently arrested in Texas on federal firearms charges and sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.¹

Russia Training Trip (2018)

In 2018, Bruce-Umbaugh and Cole traveled from Washington state to Europe on a trip that included multiple stops. According to investigative reporting drawing on federal prosecution documents, the two traveled through Ukraine using the Donbas green corridor to cross into Russia, reached St. Petersburg, and attended RIM's Partizan training facility. The training at Partizan covered firearms handling, explosives, squad movement, and tactical operations. The same facility had been used by Nordic Resistance Movement members from Sweden the year prior, whose subsequent bombings in Gothenburg (January 2017) provided the factual basis for the U.S. Department of State's April 2020 SDGT designation of RIM.²

After completing the St. Petersburg training, Bruce-Umbaugh and Cole traveled back through Ukraine into Poland and documented their trip with a photograph taken at Auschwitz concentration camp. The photograph circulated within AWD's closed communications channels.²

The training in firearms, explosives, squad movement, and terrorist tactics was, according to federal investigators, brought back to Washington state and applied within AWD's organizational activities. The Russia trip is documented in investigative reporting as of 2022 and in court-adjacent materials from federal prosecutions of both Bruce-Umbaugh and Cole, though the precise citation to specific filed documents requires a direct PACER pull of the respective case records.³

Federal Prosecution

Bruce-Umbaugh was arrested and charged in the Northern District of Texas, case number 5:19-cr-00130, with possessing firearms and ammunition as a prohibited person under federal law. He entered a guilty plea on February 3, 2020. On April 28, 2020, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison before U.S. District Judge Terry Means in Fort Worth, Texas.¹

The firearms charge rather than any terrorism-specific statute reflects the broader pattern of AWD-related prosecutions in 2019-2020, in which the federal government used available weapons statutes against members who could not be charged under the (then-unavailable) domestic terrorism designation framework. The same approach was used in the prosecution of Patrik Jordan Mathews (illegal alien in possession of a firearm) and others in the AWD network.³