A court in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region on Monday handed down prison terms to four Russian servicemen over the torture and killing of Russell Bentley, the US national widely known as the “Donbas Cowboy” who gained notoriety for joining Kremlin-backed fighters in eastern Ukraine.
Bentley, a Texas-born self-proclaimed communist who was a familiar figure in the Russian propaganda press before his death, disappeared in Donetsk in April 2024.
News of his death, which Russian outlets confirmed later that month, sparked outrage across pro-war circles, with bloggers openly faulting senior commanders for failing to safeguard him.
On Dec. 8, judges in occupied 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 term.
All three were stripped of their military ranks. A fourth man, Vladimir Bazhin, was given 18 months for helping conceal the killing.
Investigators concluded the group fatally attacked Bentley after wrongly assuming he was an American operative.
Russian officials said the inquiry showed Bentley had been tortured before he was murdered. Two soldiers allegedly blew up a vehicle containing his body, directing Bazhin to return the following day to dispose of what remained.
The episode has proven awkward for Moscow, which has promoted “shared values visas” to entice sympathetic Americans with “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” and has sought to recruit foreign nationals to bolster its forces in Ukraine.
Bentley, 64, previously fought with the Donetsk-based Vostok battalion from 2014 to 2017 in the early phase of the conflict.
He later married a Russian citizen, converted to the Orthodox faith, and secured Russian nationality in 2021, one year before the full-scale invasion.
He produced material for the Russian state-controlled Sputnik news service and was a frequent online voice championing Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, known to many simply as “Texas” or the “Donbas Cowboy.”
In 2022, Bentley praised the escalation of the war, claiming Russia “might go as far as the English channel,” or could “even liberate the United States,” while arguing that NATO had “forced” Moscow to act in Ukraine.
Bentley was also the subject of a contentious March 2022 interview with Rolling Stone with the title: ‘The bizarre story of how a hardcore Texas leftist became a frontline Putin propagandist.”
According to prosecutors, Vansyatsky and Iordanov encountered Bentley “preparing to film the aftermath of a missile strike” on April 8, 2024.
They demanded identification and an explanation for his presence. Bentley said he was reporting for Sputnik, at which point Vansyatsky “reported to the military unit command that he had identified a saboteur” before the US national was tortured and killed.
Announcing the news of Bentley’s death in 2024, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote on X: “Russel Bentley, aka Texas, a real America, a real Texas native, died in Donetsk...He fought there for our side. He collaborated with our Sputnik. Terrible. May he rest in peace…”