More on Russell Bentley, a.k.a. the "RuZZian comfort woman" ...
(The WSJ doesn't mention the alleged rape because it can't be proven, but regardless, the "Donbass Cowboy" certainly got screwed ...)
Tenchusatsu
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Mystery Death of Texan Who Fought for Moscow Sparks Outrage in Russia (WSJ)
Russell Bentley, a fixture of Russian propaganda who moved to Russian-occupied Ukraine in 2014, was found dead after detention by Russian soldiers
By Yaroslav Trofimov
Updated April 25, 2024 at 12:04 am ET
Russell Bentley, a self-described “Donbass Cowboy,” joined Russian forces soon after they created a proxy state in eastern Ukraine in 2014. He quickly became one of Russian propaganda’s favorite Americans, receiving a Russian passport and a gig with state-run Sputnik TV.
On April 8, the 64-year-old Austin native better known under his call sign “Texas” was detained by Russian soldiers in the city of Donetsk, occupied by Russia for the past decade, according to his wife. Eleven days later, he turned up dead.
He is the latest in a string of figures involved in Russia’s 2014 takeover of parts of eastern Ukraine—dubbed the “Russian Spring”—who are now in their graves or behind bars.
The circumstances behind Bentley’s disappearance are murky. But the incident has already caused outrage in Russian nationalist circles, with popular bloggers and commentators calling for an investigation and decrying what they called an official coverup.
Russian ultranationalists, particularly those involved in the original fighting of 2014 and 2015 that killed 14,000 people in Donetsk and Luhansk, criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin for not doing even more to win the war in Ukraine. They have blasted the military establishment for its execution of the full-scale invasion.
The Russian state, which initially focused on the liberal opposition, has increasingly turned the screws on the hypernationalist figures associated with the “Russian Spring” after the failed putsch by the Wagner paramilitary group of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who pilloried Russia’s top generals as incompetent. The warlord and top Wagner leaders were killed in a plane bombing last year widely blamed on Russian security services.
It isn’t clear whether Bentley’s death is part of that crackdown by security services, or an accidental result of the anti-American spy-mania fanned by the Russian state and the overall lawlessness reigning in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
Bentley’s death has caused outrage in Russian nationalist circles. PHOTO: INSTAGRAM
“The authorities can no longer control the xenophobia that they are igniting themselves, and any foreigner has become an enemy a priori,” said Marat Gelman, a former senior executive of Russian state TV who is now an opponent of Putin’s regime.
In any case, the fury at Bentley’s death among Russian nationalists is real.
“It’s hard to understand who are ‘ours’ and who are ‘enemies.’ Just traitors and freaks at the steering wheel, doing what they want,” fumed Russian soldier and blogger Yegor Guzenko, who is known under his Telegram handle Thirteenth. “Texas was murdered! The way they murdered many of our brothers. The way they murdered Prigozhin and all others who tell the truth and honestly stand for Russia!”
Bentley’s death shows that “human lives don’t matter much on the path to the great future,” and explains why “even very pro-Russian citizens [of Ukraine] rarely met Russia with flowers,” said Igor Dimitriev, a pro-Russian politician who moved to Russia from Odesa, Ukraine, in 2014.
Oleg Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who became one of the main cheerleaders of the 2022 Russian invasion and was expected to become a key member, if not leader, of a Russian-installed regime in Kyiv at the time, was also upset.
“If those guilty are not found and punished, prepare yourself for other affairs. And note that only the stories of media-famous personalities surface in the press—and how many stories of non-media-famous people are there that we don’t know about?” Tsaryov wrote on Telegram.
Bentley was certainly famous in Russia. After moving to Donetsk in 2014, the self-proclaimed Communist married a local woman, Lyudmila, converted to Orthodox Christianity and frequently castigated America.
President Barack Obama ran a “fascist government” controlled by oligarchs, Bentley said in an interview with Vice News in 2015 as he wore the Soviet red banner and the Lone Star of Texas on his uniform, adding that Russia is a much freer country. At the time, he was part of a rocket-propelled-grenade team of the Russian-backed Vostok battalion.
“Heading West with the Liberators of Ukraine. We may stop in Kiev, we may stop on the English Channel. We may liberate the USA,” Bentley wrote on VKontakte, a Russian social-media platform, once Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Bentley was part of a trickle of Americans who joined Russia’s side in its war in Ukraine, often escaping personal troubles or the law. Since 2022, hundreds more Americans have traveled to Ukraine to join the Ukrainian military as volunteers, and several of them have died in combat.
A former U.S. Army service member, Bentley ran as a third-party candidate in U.S. Senate elections in Minnesota in 1990, gaining 1.65% of the vote on a marijuana liberalization platform. He was later sentenced to five years on drug-trafficking charges, escaped near the end of his sentence and spent eight years as a fugitive before being captured by U.S. Marshals in Washington state to serve the remainder of his sentence.
Bentley’s prolific social-media appearances have gained him a following on the pro-Putin fringe in America. He wasn’t the only American veteran to switch sides. Wilmer Puello-Mota, a former sergeant with the Massachusetts Air National Guard and a former city councilman in Holyoke, Mass., defected days before his January court appearance on child-pornography charges in Rhode Island.
He appeared this month in a video shared by a Russian regional government, signing a contract to serve in the Russian military and describing how he had already fought as a volunteer against Ukrainian forces in the town of Avdiivka. “I was very fortunate…Everybody has been so kind, so supportive, just ready to help me move forward, and I want to help them now to continue the mission,” Puello-Mota said in the video.
Puello-Mota’s lawyer told the Boston Globe that the former sergeant had planned to plead guilty in exchange for an 18-month prison sentence and having to register as a sex offender.
Such American defectors with military backgrounds are very valuable for Russian propaganda that is casting the invasion of Ukraine as part of a global struggle to create a new world order. “To them this is a bigger spiritual war with the West in which the Russian spirit is somehow going to win out against the deleterious and degenerative evils of the capitalist West,” said Ian Garner, a scholar of Russian war propaganda at Queen’s University in Canada. “They are saying: We really are forming a new multipolar order, and America is breaking apart because Americans are choosing to come and work with us.”
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, posted on his social-media accounts that the Texas native was “harshly detained” by soldiers of Russia’s 5th Tank Brigade, based in Buryatia in the Russian Far East, after he traveled to cover the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike in Donetsk the afternoon of April 8. With rumors swirling that he had been mistaken for a spy after filming the area of the strike, Lyudmila said Bentley’s phone was in his car, and contained no footage taken in the area.
On April 19, Russian official media figures such as Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the Russia Today TV network, which includes Sputnik, said Bentley “has fallen in Donetsk,” without specifying the cause. Local authorities in Donetsk also confirmed his death, citing a DNA analysis, and said they had opened an investigation.
Aleksandr Khodakovsky, the commander of the Vostok battalion, initially published a post on Telegram demanding an “exemplary punishment of those who killed Russell Bentley,” adding that the military must show that it can maintain its own house in order and not just pursue critics.
The post was quickly deleted, and Vostok said on its own Telegram channel that Khodakovsky had had to remove the comments because of his official position as head of special forces for the Russian National Guard in Donetsk.
Khodakovsky is one of the few remaining original leaders of the “Russian Spring,” a Putin-backed military takeover of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions after the Maidan revolution ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Retired Russian intelligence colonel Igor Girkin, who sparked violence in the region as he took over the city of Slovyansk with a band of Russian veterans in 2014 and later served as defense minister in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, has been behind bars since July. A frequent critic of the way Russia has handled the invasion, he has been sentenced to four years imprisonment for “extremism.”
Another well-known personality of the “Russian Spring,” Capt. Igor Mangushev, a far-right nationalist who once performed holding what he said was the skull of a Ukrainian soldier, was gunned down under mysterious circumstances in a part of the Luhansk region far from the front lines in February 2023.
Yet another influential veteran of the 2014 war, fighter and popular blogger Andrey Morozov, was found dead in February this year after coming under military pressure to delete a post saying that the Russian military had lost 16,000 soldiers in its campaign to capture Avdiivka. His death was judged a suicide.
The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine said it is aware of reports of Bentley’s death in Donetsk. “Whenever we learn of the death of a U.S. citizen in Ukraine, we seek to get in touch with the family and provide all possible consular assistance,” said embassy spokesman Chad Roedemeier. “But we generally don’t comment on specifics.”
In the 2015 Vice News segment, journalist Simon Ostrovsky interviewed a Russian fighter serving alongside Bentley. “From a combat point of view, he is a very brave man,” the Russian said, adding that Bentley had taught him how to make tripwires.
“How do you know he is not an American spy?” Ostrovsky asked.
“You can tell just by looking at him,” the Russian responded as Bentley grinned, a cowboy hat atop his long gray hair.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com |
