Russell Bentley

DRP Propagandist

Unit: Sputnik Propaganda/News Outlet
Previously: Vostok Battalion, DPR Militia

Cargo ID: #1232

Call Sign: "Texas" (Техас)

English Name: Russell Bonner Bentley

Russian Name: Бентли Рассел Боннер

Date of Birth: June 20, 1960 (age: 63 years)

Place of Birth: Houston, Texas, USA

Place of Death: Petrovsky district, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (Fragged)

Social Media: OK.ru, Telegram

Death:

"On April 8, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a precise strike on the deployment point of the 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces in Donetsk. The enemy suffered losses and was furious, they began to look for the “gunner”. Russell arrived at the scene of the attack, was detained by the Russian military, and without any ceremony was subjected to severe torture"

Bentley signed off with a recent interview with: “May God protect the innocent, and may the rest of us get everything that we deserve.”

Education:

At 16, he attended high school for one semester before dropping out. Bentley later got his GED, and at age 20, was convinced by his father to join the U.S. Army.

Radicalization:

At age 30, Bentley ran as a candidate for the Grassroots Party in the 1990 election for the United States Senate in Minnesota (he lost, having obtained only 1.65% of votes).

In February 1996, Bentley's house was raided by the DEA and he was arrested for felony drug trafficking. He received a sentence of 5 years and 3 months. Although he was due to be released at the end of 1999, in August of that year he escaped from prison.

Bentley remained a fugitive for the better part of a decade before being recaptured in 2007, when he was captured and sent to a maximum-security prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. He was released from prison the following summer.

Growing conspiratorial, he insisted that 9/11 was — at least in part — an inside job, citing his "expertise" in the U.S. Army as a demolition expert: “You can say what you want about building one and two, but building seven? Anyone that doesn’t understand that that was a pre-planned, pre-placed controlled demolition is either an idiot or a liar,” he claimed.

Bentley’s disgust grew through the “bogus” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he insists the final straw was the 2011 Western military action that toppled Muammar Gadhafi in Libya. “He was one of the greatest,” Bentley said fondly. "When Gadhafi was brutally murdered on video, it really pissed me off.” He worked out his anger by donning rock climbing gear to scale a Marines recruiting billboard in Texas, defacing it with the words “FUCK NATO” in six-foot letters.

When the Maidan Revolution broke out in 2014, Bentley blamed it on the CIA and George Soros. Determined to head to the frontlines in Donbas, Bentley booked a flight for Rostov-on-Don. Before he left Texas, he recorded a song about his belief that this was “Armageddon” and he was choosing his side with “Novorussia.” He sang: “The U.S. is wrong, and I’ll do more to right it than just write this song.”

Then 54, Bentley didn’t speak Russian at the time, but made his way to the war-torn city of Donetsk. There he hooked up with a fellow Russian-sympathist expat, a writer from Italy, who showed him around and helped him hook up with the Vostok Battalion — a militia group linked to the Russian intelligence service.

Life in the so-called DPR

Bentley became a citizen of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic in 2017, and became a citizen of Russia in 2020. He grew belligerent when pressed on the contradictions of his decision to side with an authoritarian like Putin. ”What about Putin poisoning his political rivals?” a reporter asked him, referring to Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who blames the Kremlin for poisoning him with a powerful nerve agent. 

Bentley shot back: “Are you really that stupid or are you pretending to be that stupid?” He insists that it’s “a fucking question that only an idiot would fucking ask.” Bentley underscores that the alleged poisoning victims are still living. “Do you think that if Vladimir Putin, the head of the most powerful military in the world today, wanted to kill somebody that [he] would fail?” he asks. “That’s a really stupid question.”

Bentley decries the Ukranian military as the sum of all evil, blasting them as “genuine, mass-murdering Nazis.” Adding that the AFU contains “thousands of ISIS cannibals.”