The tragicomic story of a down-on-his-luck Texan who reinvented himself as a renegade conflict hero in a faux Russian republic took an surprising flip this week when he was allegedly kidnapped by Russian troops—after apparently being accused of being a CIA spy.
Russell Bentley, often known as “Texas,” is maybe the final individual one would anticipate to have pulled off crafty spycraft for the almost 10 years he’s been dwelling amongst Russian fighters in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk area. A Dallas native with a conviction on drug prices again house, Bentley briefly seized worldwide headlines again in 2014 when he was noticed in a cowboy hat with Russian fighters and spewing Kremlin propaganda about “Nazis” in Ukraine. He obtained Russian citizenship in 2020 after transforming himself as a combat-vet-turned-“journalist” for Kremlin-controlled media.
Information of his disappearance earlier this month largely went beneath the radar till his spouse, Lyudmila Bentley, went public Tuesday with claims he’d been snatched and brought hostage by Russian troops.
“Russell was brutally detained on April 8,” Lyudmila Bentley wrote in a press release on Telegram. “I CALL ON EVERYONE to do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to save lots of my husband, our ‘Texas,’” she mentioned, describing him as a “buddy of Donbass and Russia.”
“Maybe, there’s not a lot time,” she mentioned.
Russian propagandists have claimed Bentley vanished after approaching the positioning of latest shelling or mortar strikes, and one unbiased Russian information web site mentioned he’d been taking footage of the broken buildings. That element led to a flurry of conspiracy theories about Bentley doubtlessly being a mole.
On Wednesday, Bentley’s pals sought to quash these rumors, together with his self-proclaimed “brother-in-arms,” recognized solely as Vasily, releasing a video to debunk claims that Bentley had been “filming one thing on his cellphone.”
After discovering Bentley’s cellphone smashed, Vasily wrote, he was capable of examine it later, saying, “I didn’t discover ANY PHOTOS or VIDEOS.”
Graham Phillips, one other Westerner who linked up with Russian forces in japanese Ukraine and knew Bentley, issued his personal assertion Wednesday noting that “a small however lively a part of the Russian group is already writing towards Texas, reminiscent of that he was an ‘American spy,’ and so forth.”
Bizarrely, after writing that such claims are “nonsense” and unfair since Bentley isn’t round to defend himself, Phillips himself went on to subtly trash the Texan native for filming army exercise, calling it “unlawful and suspicious” to take action.
However, he mentioned, “I hope for the very best, that our Texas is alive and properly.”
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