The Donbas Cowboy
Russell “Texas” Bentley’s secrets to happiness: Stay true to your principles. And eat no shit!
His grandfather was a tank commander in World War Two.
He served under General George S. Patton.
He fought Hitler’s Nazis in Italy.
“And he was, like, the greatest man I ever knew,” Russell “Texas” Bentley told me in an interview on Tuesday, June 21st, from his home in Donetsk. “And also, from that I had kind of an anti-fascist or anti-Nazi upbringing, too.”
Russell was walking in his grandfather’s shadow that day he arrived in Donbass to fight Nazis in Ukraine.
It was December 7th, 2014, when he crossed the border into the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). He had arrived by plane in Moscow earlier, then continued on to Rostov-on-Don, an important cultural center of southern Russia, located just 32 kilometers from the Sea of Azov and about a three-hour drive from Donetsk.
After crossing the border into DPR, Russell hooked up with a friend he had been corresponding with, a writer and correspondent for Russia Today, who took him the rest of the way.
“And a week later, I was in the Novorussian armed forces,” he recalls.
He joined Vostok (East) battalion on the 14th of December and trained with them for just two weeks before he was deployed.
“The training wasn’t really anything difficult,” he said in a 2019 interview with Regis Tremblay. “What was difficult was the conditions. There was about 200 of us at this base. The Ukrops had bombed the water system of Yasynuvata, there was no running water. We had to go every morning, and go to like, wells, you know what I’m talking about? Wells, like, you know, from a fairy tale or something, with the bucket and the chain, and the little roof, and get, you know, probably 400 to 500 liters of water every day and carry them like metal milk cans back to the base on these little carts. It was tough, man. It was cold, the food was horrible, it was basically kasha with just, you know, basically, some grease on it and it was the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. There was tea, good hot tea, always served sweet, and salo too, you know, the bacon fat. So, it was carbohydrates, fat, sugar and that’s what we survived on.”
On New Year’s Eve, the last day of 2014, Russell got up at 4AM, loaded up his gear, and traveled to a monastery adjacent to the Donetsk airport, which was under Ukrainian control at the time.
“When I got there, it was just at dawn, it was dark still. It was very, very cold in those days, like twenty-five below. And as soon as I got out of the van, the first thing I saw was a blown-up church.”
“I understood that that was the symbol of this war, you know,” Russell recalls. “Between good and evil, and I also realized that the position that I was going to be manning was basically right in the middle of a giant cemetery, so it was the struggle between life and death.”
Russell’s intuition proved accurate in the days that followed.
They unloaded food and water and ammunition, and on New Year’s Day, they were already fighting. There were Ukrainian snipers in the airport’s control tower and they rained bullets down on the cemetery and the monastery where Russell and his comrades were holed up.
“The only heat was from wood-burning stoves and the only light was from candles or flashlights, and all the windows were filled up with sandbags, so there was no light even during the day.”
It was dark and cold, and the place was filled with smoke from the stoves on the east side of the building. The west side of the building faced the airport and was open to enemy artillery and sniper bullets.
“And so you had the choice between either not building the fire in the stove, and then it would be literally twenty-five below zero, or you could build the fire in the stove, but then the smoke would come in. I mean, the wind would blow the smoke right back down the chimney into the rooms.”
Years later, in 2019, Russell says his lungs have not fully healed from all the smoke he inhaled during that hard time. He was there for two weeks and every day and night, he says, both sides fired thousands upon thousands of rounds of bullets.
“We were in the east facing to the west,” he explains, “so…as the sun was setting behind them, which blocked our vision and made them be able to see us better, that’s when they’d come and attack us, as the sun was setting. And then the attacks would continue on into the night. Sometimes, all night long.”
On January 16th, a little over two weeks since he’d arrived, a doctor ordered him to go to an infirmary because of his cough. He’d picked up a lung infection in Yasynuvata, and now the smoke had made it hard to breathe.
“Which is very lucky for me, because the next day, there was a major attack by the Ukrainian army and Praviy Sektor [Right Sector] Nazis against the monastery. There was twelve of our guys, twelve friends of mine, that held that position against two hundred Ukrops and Nazis. They were attacking with BMPs, tanks, and 200 Ukrainian infantry, and they held the position. Three of our guys got killed in that battle, but more than one hundred Ukrainians also died in that same battle.”
Soon after that, Russell and his comrades were moved to another position in a place called Staraya Melnitsa, which means “Old Mill.” He was only there a week or so when the building he was in took a direct hit from a 120mm mortar.
Russel shakes his head from side to side, flashing back to that moment. “The numbers of times that bullets have, you know, come within a foot of my head, you know, or artillery has come so close…”
He had been sleeping in an adjoining room, wondering whether or not to get up and make himself a cup of tea. Luckily, he decided not to, and the instant after he rolled over to go back to sleep, the wall across the room exploded, spraying shrapnel and chunks of concrete all over the table where the coffee and tea was made.
A couple of his comrades took shrapnel but were only lightly injured, he says.
“So, it was just a matter of seconds and a matter of inches, I mean, the difference between death or, not a scratch.”
In June of 2015, his unit was transferred to a Spetsnaz battalion and they were moved from the front to an official army base with a barracks where living conditions were better than they had previously endured. However, discipline here was strict and permission from a commander was needed to leave the base for any reason, Russel says, even just to go across the street to buy toothpaste. If the commander wasn’t there, it was tough luck and the enlisted had to wait until he returned, even if that took several days.
“Also: Very, very, very tough training,” he recalls. “And by this time, I was 55 years old, and I started thinking that maybe I’m not quite cut out for, you know, Spetsnaz, acrobat, ninja, you know, James Bond-type stuff. And it wasn’t that I was scared, or even that I was not physically able to do it, but I wasn’t physically able to do it as well as guys in their early or mid-20’s who were well-trained, real athletes.”
Russell worried about slowing his younger comrades down, so he approached his commander and asked for a different assignment.
“By this time, I had been interviewed a few times,” he says. “VICE news had interviewed me, and I did very well in that interview even though Simon Ostrovsky was trying to do a hatchet job on me. You know, I pretty much turned it around on him. That episode got like half a million views and, you know, most of the comments were in support of me rather than Ostrovsky.”
Russell says his commanders decided that he would make a good “information warrior,” so he started writing.
He put together a story about Anna Tuv, a woman from Gorlovka, whose house had been bombed. Her husband and 11-year-old daughter were killed in the blast, her home was demolished, and she lost her left arm above the elbow.
Anna had managed to dig herself, her two-week-old infant and her three-year-old son from the rubble before waiting two hours for an ambulance, which was delayed because of the shelling. Somehow, she even made a tourniquet for her own arm.
Russell interviewed her in a hospital and made a video of her ruined house which had a powerful impact on viewers, and $10,000 was raised to buy Anna a prosthetic arm.
From that point on, Russell spent most of his time writing stories about people like Anna and raising money for people and charities in need. By and large, his soldiering days were over, though he still served at the front on occasion. And even now, he keeps his military garb and equipment in a bag and says he can be ready to fight in half an hour.
He helped to buy equipment for the Donetsk Baseball League, after their previous sponsors pulled out. After Maidan, when the people of Donetsk and Lugansk decided to break away from Ukraine, a Little League in Pennsylvania which had been supplying them with balls, bats, helmets, mitts and other gear, abruptly cut ties with them, calling them “separatists.”
And he delivered humanitarian aid to families, orphaned children and schools countless times.
But no good deeds go unpunished, it seems.
Social media giants began to systematically scrub Russell’s articles, photos and videos from the internet, or move them lower in the feed so that the hit pieces about him rose to the top.
“I was telling what I saw here on the ground. From back then, 2015. 2016, they kicked off of Twitter. 2017, PayPal shut me down. 2019, Facebook kicked me off. 2022, I made a video, I did it on YouTube. For 12 years, even before I came here, I did a lot of really good, important videos on YouTube, probably eight- or nine-hundred of them. Millions of views. I made a video in March of this year. It got, well the count on YouTube was 150,000 in one day, but it obviously went much more viral than that. Jimmy Kimmel, he showed the whole video on his show, you know, and talking shit about me, so, you know, it got multi millions of views, and not just on YouTube. The day after I posted it, my whole YouTube channel was shut down. So, I mean, they are censoring me every way they can.”
Russell says he was also locked out of his two websites, RussellTexasBentley.com and RussellTexasBentley.info.
“There’s some good stuff on both of them but I’m locked out of them. I started making a third one on the Wix website platform, and they just wrote to me after about a month and said ‘we’re not gonna let you have a website on our platform.’ So I’m as censored as I possibly can be.”
Despite these obstacles, Russell feels that his long journey is over.
He has come home.
Sweet Home Novorossiya.
All the things he searched for his whole life were waiting for him here in Donetsk People’s Republic, he says.
“When I was 30 years old, I had lived on South Padre Island for seven years. I was just, like, a hedonistic playboy, it was like spring break all year round, you know, it was back in the days of cocaine and drinking all night,” he reflects, “And, I mean, it was a lot of fun for a while, you know, for a twenty-year-old guy. But I eventually got tired of it. And I moved up to Minnesota and I really changed my life. And I got down on my knees and I said a prayer one night and I said, ‘Dear God show me the road that You want me to walk. And give me the wisdom to see it and the courage to walk it.’ And He did. And it brought me here.”
His journey was as much a spiritual one as well as a physical one.
“I’ve always been a very spiritual guy. I studied all the great religions, I actually spent a couple of years in South Dakota with the Lakota Indians and did the Inipi sweat lodge over a hundred times with them. I got adopted into the tribe, got an Indian name, which is, by the way, “Oyate Yahapa Ki,” which means “He Speaks for His People.” And I’ve studied Zen Buddhism when I was young. I’ve read the Bible many times, multiple times, the whole thing. I’ve read the Quran. The whole thing, I hung out with some Suni Muslims for about a year. Learned about Islam from them, fasted for Ramadan with them.”
But western Christianity left Russell feeling cold. The Catholic Church, which at one time had a former Nazi as a Pope, turned him off even though he still praises some individual Catholics.
“There’s a lot of good Catholics. I got an old friend who runs the Catholic worker house in Des Moines, Iowa. And he’s a Catholic priest and he’s a real saintly guy, you know. He’s been to prison a couple of times for, like, anti-war protests and stuff. And he lives taking care of homeless people in the middle of a very depressed city, so there’s good Catholic people.”
But western sects which teach “prosperity gospel” repel and disgust Russell, along with the love of money which goes against the grain of his communist leanings.
“All the rich people come to have a big circle jerk, and the preacher says, ‘well you’re good, and that’s why you’re rich, because God is rewarding you. And all these poor people are bad, because they’re poor, and you don’t have to worry about them.’ And you know, these preachers have private jets and multiple mansions and a hundred-thousand-dollar gold Rolex and shit like that. That ain’t what Jesus was about at all, you know.”
Russell converted to the Russian Orthodox religion after being inspired by the example of Orthodox priests and monks who he refers to respectfully as “real warriors,” or “Bogatyr,” which means “warrior sent from God.”
“I found my real religion here, you know, the Orthodox religion. And it’s just a theory on my part, but, you know how in the King James Bible there’s a strange gap in the life of Jesus between when he was a young kid, and then he comes back when he’s 30, or 33. And I think in those years, he was here. He was in this part of the world, teaching, founding the Orthodox Church. And it’s just my theory, but I base it on the genuine Christianity of the Russian Orthodox Church, which I think is the only real Christian church in the world today.”
Along with religion, Russell found love in war-torn Donbas. He told Regis Tremblay about how he met his wife, an English teacher from that region.
“Lyudmila, she wrote to me on VKontakte, which is like the Russian version of Facebook. I’d made a video and she’s an English teacher, Lyudmila is, and she wrote to me and said ‘oh I see one of my students is in your video,’ and I said, ‘cool, a girl from Donetsk that speaks perfect English, I should write her back.’”
He says that he knew he was going to marry her the first time he met her. Now they have a little house with a big garden in the district of Petrovsky.
“She’s a good bit younger than me, but in so many ways, more wise and more mature than I’ll probably ever be. Russian women, of course they’re beautiful, but also, they have the wisdom and the patience and the toughness, too, to handle any situation, make any situation better. She’s also a great cook. I eat a lot of borsch now and I like it.”
For now, though, they cannot return to their Petrovsky home, which is just a few kilometers from the front line and in an area that has been hit with heavy shelling. So the couple remains in the center of Donetsk, which has also been getting shelled, just not as badly.
“But you just can’t be afraid,” Russell observes. “Fear is what kills your humanity and your soul. Because if you’re afraid, then you’re like ‘oh, no, I have to live.’ And then you’ll do anything to live. You’ll be like those kapos, you know, the Jews in the concentration camps that, you know, took other Jews to the gas chambers or whatever. Of course, they ended up there too, you know. So, don’t sell out your principles. Be willing to live and die for them, and that’s the key to happiness. Because I’ll say, you know, I turned 62 yesterday, and I’m the happiest that I’ve ever been in my whole life, and I’ve had a great life. A lot of fun, a lot of pleasure, a lot of adventures, and here I am now, 62, in the middle of a war, a serious war. You know, our water works about two hours a day, we’re not sure if we’re going to have electricity, you know, we’re not sure if a bomb’s gonna land on our house, but I’m still the happiest I’ve ever been, you know.”
As for those who still don’t believe there are Nazis in Ukraine, Russell thinks that they may be hopelessly propagandized. He refers to them as “shit-eaters.”
“If you eat shit for long enough, you get used to it,” he says, “And if you eat shit for too long, you start to like it. And you like it so much, that when somebody comes along and says ‘don’t eat shit, that’s disgusting! It’s bad for you!’ And you’re like ‘No! Screw you, I like it, it’s good! Don’t tell me what to do!’”
So take it from Russell.
If you want to be happy, stay true to your principles.
Get rid of your fear.
And don’t eat any shit!
Note: This is part two of a two part article. You can read part one here. You can watch the raw video of my interview with Russell “Texas” Bentley here. And you can watch his 2019 interview with Regis Tremblay here. The comments in this article were taken from both of these interviews.
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.
