Alistair P-M
Sep 21, 2024
On September 20 2024, it was reported (by RT) that Russian authorities have brought charges against four members of the Russian Armed Forces for the killing of Russell Bentley:
Russian authorities have accused four members of the Donetsk People’s Republic militia of kidnapping and killing an American, Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley, earlier this year. Texas-born Bentley joined the militia in 2014, when Kiev-backed forces attempted to quell an uprising against the armed coup that had overthrown the government. He later became a Russian citizen and worked as a stringer for Sputnik news agency. He disappeared on April 8, during a Ukrainian artillery attack on Donetsk. On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee announced criminal charges against four soldiers, alleging that they tortured Bentley to death and then tried to cover up their crime by destroying his car and moving the body. Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko named the four suspects as Vitaly Vasnyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsev, Vladimir Bazhin and Andrey Iordanov, all members of the ‘Oplot’ brigade of the Russian armed forces, formerly the DPR militia. They face multiple charges, including assault and torture causing death and covering up a serious crime. According to the investigation, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev and Iordanov assaulted Bentley on April 8. The torture they subjected him to inadvertently killed him, whereupon Vansyatsky and Agaltsev used a block of TNT to blow up a VAZ 2115 car with Bentley’s body inside. The following day, Vasnyatsky ordered Bazhin to cover up the crime by moving Bentley’s remains elsewhere. The four suspects have been informed of the results of the investigation, Petrenko said. The case will now proceed to indictments and court hearings. Bentley’s widow Lyudmila first raised the alarm about his disappearance, appealing for help from Russian President Vladimir Putin. She also sought assistance from RT and Sputnik. On April 19, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan confirmed Bentley’s death. The Investigative Committee launched its investigation shortly thereafter. “If it weren’t for Lyudmila, everything might have turned out differently,” Bentley’s close friend, director Alexander Korobko, told the outlet Ridus on Friday. Lyudmila Bentley welcomed the Investigative Committee’s announcement, but said that none of the soldiers showed any remorse for what they did, despite Vasnyatsky’s attempt to take responsibility himself and cover for the others. Korobko insisted that Bentley’s work in the Donbass will outlive him, and that “in a spiritual sense, ‘Texas’ will never die.”
The post below was written in April, just after the announcement that Bentley had been confirmed killed.
Reporting honestly about Ukraine is dangerous
Vasiliy Prozorov
On April 12 there was an assassination attempt on Vasiliy Prozorov, the former SBU officer who defected to Russia over the course of the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation, Ukraine’s term for its war on the Donbass republics from 2014-15) and who has been running the UKR Leaks channel on Telegram and elsewhere. A bomb went off under his car when he started the engine, but he miraculously escaped almost unscathed. The FSB say they have already made a number of arrests in connection with the attack, which led unsurprisingly back to Ukraine and the SBU.
He had this to say to his would-be assassins:
This video was published on the UKR_Leaks_Eng channel, showing the detonation of the explosive, the capture of the bomber, and the bomber’s testimony:
He testifies that he was working on the orders of Vasyl Malyuk, head of the SBU (as mentioned in this BBC article).
It feels redundant to say that Ukraine openly and proudly targets individuals in these kind of terrorist attacks, people like Daria Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky and Ilya Kiva, but it should be repeated because it’s something the mainstream news will never admit openly, even though Ukraine gloatingly takes credit for them on their Myrotvorets pages.
Russell Bentley
On April 8, the American Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley AKA The Donbass Cowboy, also went missing. Bentley, originally from Texas, moved to Donbass in 2014, fought for the DPR and reported on the situation at the front, running a Telegram channel and contributing to reports with other English-speaking reporters like Brit Graham Philips (whose work interviewing the moron Aiden Aslin while in DPR custody saw him get sanctioned by his own country).
In the days following Bentley’s disappearance, there was a lot of speculation about what might have happened to him, focussing primarily on the possibility of his abduction by pro-Ukraine forces. His cell phone was found, damaged, in his car. In the days that followed, it became apparent that he had been kidnapped by a Russian tank unit, allegedly because he was filming around the site of a HIMARS attack and they thought he was spying for Ukraine, but that part is contested.
This video was released by one of Bentley’s former comrades on 17 April:
Yesterday, April 19, Bentley’s wife (whom he met in the DPR) appeared to confirm that he was killed. She gave no details, but said that the investigation is being handled by the Military Investigative Committee.
NAFO losers are obviously having a field day, crowing about how this ‘proves’ how bad and untrustworthy Russians are. The price of freedom of speech is allowing smallminded cretins to show how smallminded and cretinous they are, so let those retards hang themselves by their own petards.
Semion Eremine
Also on April 19, it was confirmed that Russian reporter for Izvestia Semion Eremine had been killed near Zaporizhia by a drone attack on him and his film crew.
I wasn’t aware of Eremine before hearing about his death, but I have been a follower of both Texas Bentley and the UKR Leaks channel for some time now. There are only a handful of English-speaking reporters actually reporting from Donbass, who are constantly smeared in Western media, as was Bentley. Gonzalo Lira was another dissident voice, who dared to speak out against the monolithic mainstream consensus and got ruthlessly smeared for it, eventually paying the ultimate price by dying in a Ukrainian prison.
There have also been some journalists killed in Ukraine proper, all of whose deaths I hope are investigated and the guilty parties held to account, no matter who they are. According to this Voice of America (funded by US Congress) article, an investigation has been opened in France into the death of French-Irish Fox News journalist Pierre Zakrzewski in March 2022. In April 2022 Vera Hyrych died in Kiev, in an incident that was blamed on Russia, but I still think that the official account of her death makes no sense. These are confusing and distressing times we are living in.
Republished from The Reluctant Dissident.