Texas Man who fought for Russia was murdered by Russian soldiers. Gotta be top contender for top FAFO [View all]

4 Russian Soldiers Sentenced to Prison for Killing Texan Who Fought for Moscow
Russell Bonner Bentley III, 64, who was living in the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine, was beaten and tortured to death after he was suspected of being an American saboteur, investigators said.

A military court in a Russian-occupied region of Ukraine sentenced four soldiers on Monday to prison terms of up to 12 years for the gruesome murder of a self-avowed American Communist from Texas who had spent a decade as a mercenary and propagandist for Moscow.
The killing proved embarrassing for the Kremlin because the victim, Russell Bonner Bentley III, 64, who moved to the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014 after Moscow started a separatist conflict there, had been a regular guest on state television, extolling Russia’s case in his Southern drawl.
Mr. Bentley, who called himself the “Donbas Cowboy,” disappeared in April 2024 after going to survey the aftermath of an artillery strike in downtown Donetsk, the city in the eastern region where he lived. Two of the convicted soldiers had found him preparing to film the scene and suspected he was an American saboteur.
When the men demanded identification, Mr. Bentley explained that he was working for Russia’s state-run Sputnik news agency, the court heard. The two soldiers drove him to their command post, where he was detained, beaten and tortured to death, investigators said.

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He later grew convinced from reading pro-Russia social media posts that the government in Kyiv was a den of Nazis, and he decided that he wanted to fight them, according to several profiles of him in Western news outlets.
He emigrated from Round Rock, Texas, a town just north of Austin, in December 2014, the profiles said. Using the call sign “Texas,” he fought for Russia’s Vostok Battalion, which accepted foreign fighters, for three years, and then decided that, at his age, he was better suited for the information wars. He became a Russian citizen in 2020.

At the time of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he was producing a flood of posts about the conflict brimming with disinformation. In a YouTube post later deleted by the platform, he extolled Russian soldiers as liberators.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/world/europe/russia-soldiers-sentence-murder-texas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7U8.29pw.7mJDGSVGnd8v&smid=nytcore-ios-share