This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
A court in a Russian-controlled part of Ukraine sentenced four Russian soldiers over the death last year of Russell Bentley, a US citizen who as the “Donbas Cowboy” gained notoriety for joining Russia-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
The court in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk sentenced two of the soldiers, Major Vitaly Vansyatsky and Lieutenant Andrei Iordanov, to 12 years in a penal colony, while Sergeant Vladislav Agaltsev received an 11-year prison sentence.
A fourth soldier, Vladimir Bazhin, was handed 1 1/2 years for helping cover up Bentley’s death.
The four were found guilty of killing Bentley after mistaking him for a US saboteur. Russian authorities said an investigation showed he had been tortured before being killed. His abductors then tried to cover up the death by detonating a car containing his body.
Bentley, 64, was a fixture in the low-level Russian incursion in Ukraine dating back to 2014. Hailing from Texas and calling himself the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley became a popular figure on Russian propaganda networks for his criticism of the US government.
According to investigators, Vansyatsky and Iordanov caught Bentley “preparing to film the aftermath of a missile strike” on April 8, 2024.
They demanded that Bentley present his documents and explain his reason for being there, to which he introduced himself as a reporter, having worked for Russian state-controlled news agency Sputnik. Vansyatsky then “reported to the military unit command that he had identified a saboteur.”
He received orders to deliver Bentley to the command post, after which he instructed Iordanov to detain the American.
Bentley was placed in a car, beaten, and tortured, which resulted in his death.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev then placed his body in the trunk of the car and detonated it, according to investigators. The next day, Bazhin and Iordanov went to the site of the car bombing and burned the remains of the victim.
Bentley, whose military call sign was Texas, went missing in Donetsk in April 2024.
Bentley fought for the Vostok battalion between 2014 and 2017 and obtained Russian citizenship in 2021. He served in the US Army for three years — he was honorably discharged — and once ran for election to the US Senate while living in Minnesota.
Margarita Simonyan, Russia’s leading pro-Kremlin journalist and editor in chief of the state-controlled broadcaster RT, wrote on X at the time that Bentley died for “our people” in Donetsk.
