I noticed yesterday that one of my readers had dug up an old blog post of mine (“old” being from May 3rd of this year) having to do with the strange disappearance and unexplained demise of American-turned-Russian Russell Bentley, who was last seen fighting for the Russians in Ukraine. And I wondered why the sudden interest in this story. I also wondered what had happened to Bentley’s widow, Lyudmila, since his death, so I went digging.

I didn’t have to dig very far, because there had been news just yesterday of the arrest of four Russian service members charged with Bentley’s death on April 8th. The Russian Investigative Committee has concluded that Bentley, 64, was tortured and killed by members of the Fifth Brigade. [Maya Mehrara, Newsweek, September 20, 2024.]

Bentley’s life in the United States before coming to Russia was anything but ordinary. The brief version (from Wikipedia) says enough:

“Russell Bonner Bentley III . . . also known as Texas and the Donbass [sic] Cowboy, was an American man who served in Vostok Battalion and XAH Spetsnaz Battalion in 2014, 2015 and 2017 on the side of the Donetsk People’s Republic [Russian-occupied Ukraine]. He was a YouTuber until his channel was deleted in early 2022. He also worked for the Russian state-owned Sputnik news agency as a war correspondent. Prior to his activities in the Donbas, he was a marijuana activist and smuggler who was later convicted of drug smuggling and spent five years in prison.”

There’s a lot more, but you can see that he was, to state it mildly, a colorful character. Relocating to Russia in 2014, he married a Russian woman, Lyudmila, and reinvented himself as a warrior and war correspondent. And on April 8th of 2024, he disappeared. His body was finally found around the 19th of April; it was thought at the time that he had most likely been “picked up by soldiers mistaking him for an American or NATO spy” and killed. [DailyMail.com, April 25, 2024.]

And it has now been reported by Russian media outlet Rg.Ru that four members of the Russian Armed Forces — Vitaly Vansyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsev, Vladimir Bazhin, and Andrei Iordanov — have been charged with “torturing and killing Bentley as a group through negligence, an action reportedly beyond their authority.” [Newsweek, op.cit.]

Did they really say, “Through negligence”??!!!

A friend of Bentley’s wife has confirmed to Astra Press that Bentley “died as a result of electric current torture, . . . [and that] his heart couldn’t withstand the electric shocks.” I’m sorry, but I can’t fathom how that can be classified as “negligence.”

Maybe it really was a case of mistaken identity. Maybe they did think — hearing his Texas/American accent and not recognizing him — that he was a NATO infiltrator. So do they arrest him, take him into custody and lock him up until they can verify his identity? Oh, no. Instead, they go directly to the most brutal kind of interrogation — electric shock — and kill the poor bastard. Then try to cover their tracks by hiding his body for a week and a half.

And now, some five months later, the Russian hierarchy brings forth four scapegoats to take the punishment for what is surely the brutal business-as-usual of the entire Russian Army — perhaps labeling it as “negligence . . . beyond their authority” in order to avoid having to invoke the maximum penalty.

It might have brought some comfort to Lyudmila Bentley if she could have learned that her husband had died in battle. But this . . . this horror will haunt her for the rest of her life.

It is an ending worthy of Dostoyevsky.

It is a Russian ending.

Just sayin’. . . .

Brendochka
9/21/24