Historica Wiki
Advertisement
Russell Bentley

Russell "Texas" Bentley (1960-8 April 2024) was an American communist who fought for the Donetsk People's Republic during the Donbass War.

Biography[]

Russell Bentley was born in Austin, Texas in 1960, and he became interested in socialism at the age of twelve after reading the works of men such as Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. He served in the US Army in Louisiana and Germany for three years before becoming a waiter in South Padre Island, Texas. In 1990, he moved to Minneapolis and worked as a lumberjack before becoming a marijuana dealer. He ran for the US Senate in 1990 as the Grassroots Party candidate, losing with 1.65% of the vote. In the mid-1990s, he visited Cuba and became a communist. He was imprisoned in 1996 for marijuana trafficking, but he escaped in 1999 and lived as a fugitive until 2007, when he was sent back to prison to serve out his term. He was released the following summer, and he became an arborist in Round Rock, Texas. Bentley would decide to join the Vostok Battalion of the Donetsk People's Republic in December 2014, believing that the new government of Ukraine was fascist, and that Russia was not an authoritarian state, but an ally of the Donbass rebels. Bentley would take part in fighting the Ukrainian Army on the front lines until June 2015, and he entered the information warfare branch of the armed forces of the DPR. Bentley released videos of himself in Donetsk, and he was also interviewed by Vice News on one occasion. Bentley celebrated the death of pro-Ukraine American fighter Mark Paslawsky, and he accused America of being a fascist police state, accused all Ukrainian soldiers of being Nazis, and claimed that Russia was less of a dictatorship than America. By July 2016, he had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox church, and he became a Russian citizen in 2021. On 8 April 2024, he was killed by Russian Army soldiers Vitaly Vasnyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsev, Vladimir Bazhin, and Andrey Yordanov, who had mistaken him for an American spy.

Advertisement