What Happened to Russell Bentley?

I’ve spoken about Russell Bentley’s mishap and death before on the podcast, but never written about it. However, I haven’t been idle. When I first heard of his disappearance on April 10, I started making some inquiries with my contacts.

Though I had never met Russell in person, I have corresponded with him in person and he forwarded a copy of his book for my thoughts on. So I was deeply concerned about his disappearance, but I didn’t cause a stink. While he was missing and before the death confirmation, I believed it was best to not make too much noise, as widespread publicity wouldn’t necessarily help him if he was in a potential kidnapping/hostage situation.

Now a couple of weeks later, I think I have all the facts I’m ever going to have.

First, a quick rundown on the man himself. Russell Bentley was an American veteran who traveled to Donetsk shortly after the civil war broke out in 2014 and joined the pro-Russian separatists. He saw combat against the “cyborgs,” the infamous Ukrainian neo-nazi militia that spearheaded the invasion of Donbass after the collapse of the state military. Due to his age as well as his skills at English and internet marketing, Russell moved away from combat operations and switched to fund-raising and public awareness efforts.

Like many of the international volunteers who joined the fight in 2014, Russell eventually married a Russian woman, an English teacher named Lyudmila, and settled down with her. In 2018 he published a book about his war experiences titled The Donbass Cowboy. He also started work as a journalist for Sputnik.

The exact events surrounding Russell’s disappearance and death are a little murky, but it went down something like this. On April 8 there was a Ukrainian shelling in Donetsk, and Russell left his wife and went toward the noise to see if he could help. He never returned. On April 18, Margarita Simonyan stated on Telegram that he had been killed, though didn’t elaborate much further than that. On the same day I received the following messages from one of my friends in Donetsk:

This is a completely plausible explanation. There is a lot of Ukrainian spetsnaz and partisan activity in Donbass, and Americans stick out like a sore thumb. Ukrainians and their allies in Eastern Europe also have a special hatred for us. I think they actually hate us more than Russians. Slava Ukrainii trolls on social media frequently tell me how much they would like to kill me, so yeah I get the idea. In the absence of more evidence, this is the most likely cause of what happened to him.

However we have to be fair and consider that someone on the pro-Russian side did something to him, and this is exactly what pro-Ukrainian propaganda outlets claimed shortly after his disappearance, along with a lot of vile fantasies about what they thought (or wished) was done to him.

There was one particular story started by a Facebook account that supposedly belong to his wife claiming that he had been arrested by members of the 5th Tank Battalion. The Facebook account in question did not respond to my inquiries so I consider this claim as of now to be unverified. However, I would not rule out foul play on that side of the aisle. This isn’t Moscow, it’s Donetsk, a war zone, and bad things happen in a war zone, especially to foreigners. And let’s be real here. The Russian government’s grip on the region is a bit tenuous. That place known as “the Ukraine” is a corrupt hole, and Donbass was up until very recently a part of the mess.

Just the fact that Russia was up until April 2022 perfectly fine with letting Ukraine keep Donbass is a bit telling. Declaring Donetsk a part of Russia didn’t magically eliminate the corruption and violence overnight. Nobody in “Putin’s ruSSian expansionist government” was in a hurry to take on the expensive and exhausting project of cleaning up former regions of the Ukraine. They only ended up doing it because they got painted into a corner. The separatists wanted to be a part of Russia and Russia wanted Donbass to be a part of Ukraine, but in the end the tail wagged the dog to an extent and the separatists got their way. Keep this in mind next time someone on the internet whines about Russia seizing pieces of Ukraine. This only happened because of Ukrainian stupidity in throwing away the April 2022 peace deal, and the NATO pressure on them to do this.

I will tell you from second-hand knowledge that more Americans died in Afghanistan and Iraq from “foul play” than the Pentagon will ever officially admit. There’s the story of Pat Tillman being killed by his own team and then his personal letters burned to cover it up, but that only became a scandal because Tillman was a famous football player. If he was just a nobody from the cornfields of Iowa or a trailer park in Georgia, no one would have ever found or even cared what happened to him. In war it’s just too easy to arrange for someone you don’t like to “die” and when there are people dying every day authorities just won’t have the mental bandwidth to particularly care about the death of one guy.

Overall, I find the Russian authorities’ response to Russell’s death to be unsatisfactory, and I find the response of Russell’s employers to be unsatisfactory. But I especially find the American government’s response unsatisfactory. When an American citizen dies in a foreign country, regardless of his personal viewpoints, the American government has a responsibility to investigate and demand answers, but they did not, and they never do. Americans are killed or disappear all the time and no one in the US government cares unless that person is gay, black, jewish, or one of the other “special” groups, and Russell was none of those things. He wasn’t even transgender.

Logically, it would make sense for the USA to diplomatically turn the screws on Russia about what happened to Russell. Russian authorities would have to either admit it was foul play, or they just don’t know about a murder that happened on their own territory. The reality is that the USA just truly does not give a shit about its own people unless the correct lobbying group pushes a button. The Biden regime doesn’t care about Russell dying any more than they cared about Gonzalo Lira dying in a Ukrainian prison.

As for why a person of Russian persuasion would want to harm Russell, well, I have to be honest. He was a stereotypical Texan who had a habit of rubbing people the wrong way. It did not help that he barely spoke a word of Russian. Nothing bad, that’s just the way he was. Here’s an incident he described in his book (for context, Eva was a young lady he was spending time with):

Club Banana is one of the top clubs in Donetsk, city center, right off Artem Blvd, right across from the Donbass Palace Hotel. Since the beginning of the war, it was the soldier bar. 90% of the clients were soldiers, and 90% of the soldiers were Sparta Battalion. I had been there once before with Christian and Maria, during my sick leave, and liked the first class bar, excellent food and the portrait of Che that was prominently displayed, just like at the Cuba restaurant. Alfonzo, Eva and I got a table and enjoyed some more drinks, but that’s where things start getting a bit fuzzy.

In fact, the only idea I have about what happened next is based on where I woke up the next day and some fragments related by Eva and Alfonzo. Club Banana was the bar of Sparta Battalion, led by the legendary Motorola, the battalion whose HQ was the old SBU, where I had applied to enlist, and been shined on, back in December.

Our unit, Sut Vremeny, was a serious frontline unit, real combat troops, and Alfonzo and I had been shot at many times every day for the last two months. But Sparta were assault troops, the guys who six weeks before had attacked and taken the New Terminal from the Ukrop “Cyborgs” and killed all the ones who didn’t run away. We were tough, but they were tougher, and Club Banana was their bar. And, somehow, something happened.

I don’t know if it was because Alfonzo was Black, or if the Texan recruit was acting a bit too ‘Austintatiously’, but somehow five Sparta soldiers confronted us and I didn’t like it. Things got serious.

Back then, I did not carry a pistol or grenade for protection but I did carry a Ker – shaw Whirlwind assisted opening knife which opened as fast as a switchblade and came from the factory as sharp as a scalpel, and I do mean sharp. Not razor sharp, laser sharp, guaranteed to cut anything that so much as touched the cutting edge. And when I pulled it and flipped it open, prepared to operate on one of the Sparta soldiers, Eva stepped in between us, and somehow touched the blade. Instantly, her blood flowed.

I do not remember that part, or what came after. Apparently, we went outside and I got what some might say was a well deserved ass-whoopin’. Well deserved or not, an ass-whoopin’ was what I got. I was wakened some time later in Lenin Plaza by two military policemen. I was beaten, but not too badly, and my Kershaw blade and camouflage cowboy hat were gone. To the credit of Sparta Battalion and the DNR in general, I still had my wallet and all my money, despite having been knocked unconscious and laying on the street for some time. Even the cops were merciful. I managed to mumble the address of the Red Cat, and they gave me a ride. I don’t remember crawling into bed, but Eva was gone and Alfonzo gave me a lecture which included his smashing the empty cognac bottle on the floor of my room.

I think one potential problem in American-Russian relations is that Russians are more tolerant and long-suffering than us, so an American might not realize how annoyed the Russian is getting until certain red lines are crossed and it’s too late. Such cultural differences can be further aggravated by the language barrier. This applies equally well to Ukrainians who, let’s be honest, are just Russians.

Compare this with European tourists who come to the USA and get shot while trying to buy drugs. Things happen when you’re in a bad part of town, and a foreigner doesn’t necessarily recognize the warning signs when he’s getting into a bad situation.

Ultimately, let this just be a lesson on the hazards of going to an active combat zone. Stay out of Donbass and Ukraine unless you really know what you are doing, and be prepared to accept the risks that come with it.

Ian Kummer

Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty

• Facebook
• VK
• LinkedIn

All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).

---

---