The Donbas Cowboy
From roping cows to selling weed and doing time.
Russell “Texas” Bentley’s hard ride to Ukraine.
It was her eyes that called him.
The green eyes looking straight into the camera.
The woman’s legs were gone, torn from her body in a violent explosion moments before.
Inna Kukuruza was just a month shy of her 48th birthday when the Ukrainian rockets smashed into the city administration building in Lugansk on June 2nd, 2014.
Now she only had minutes to live. The woman Inna had just been talking with lay dead by her side. A man was walking by with a cell phone, shooting pictures of the grisly aftermath.
Inna asked the man if she could use his phone to call her family, because she knew she was dying. She looked up into the camera as the life drained out of her.
To Russell Bentley, an arborist in his 50’s, it felt like a personal plea for help.
“It was like she was looking into my eyes,” Russell told me in an interview from his home in Donetsk on Tuesday, “as if to say, ‘what are you going to do about this?’”
He’d already been thinking about coming to Donbas, the war-torn region in eastern Ukraine where the Russian-speaking population had been under attack by neo-Nazis since the newly-installed regime in Kiev had taken power earlier in the year.
“But when I saw that photograph, I knew for sure. I said that there’s nothing that can stop me from going.”
Just six months later, at the age of 54, he was on his way to the place he now calls home. His entire life, he feels, was leading him to Donbas.
He talked with Regis Tremblay about it in 2019. “Like, this is the destiny of where I was meant to be,” he said in the interview. “And so, all the hard stuff that happened to me before in life, I’m glad of, because it prepared me for this, it made me able to do this.”
Russell’s life journey was a long one and often a rough one.
He grew up in Austin, Texas, where he was born just three years before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In his teen years he describes himself as a cowboy.
“Spent my teenage years down in Brownsville, Texas, right on the Mexican border,” he told me. “So, I’ve roped cows a lot from a horse and swam across the Rio Grande, and if that ain’t a cowboy, I don’t know what one is.”
His father owned a factory in Mexico, which he ran from an office just across the river in Texas. The setup is called a maquiladora, a type of business where the administrative work is done in the US while the manufacturing is done in Mexico, at a tremendous savings to the owner.
Russell says his dad got rich running the heavy steel construction factory, where he had about 500 employees. Russell, too, worked at the factory where he made $98 a week as a welder. It was his first job. But he learned a lot more there than a trade.
“The guys that I was working with,” Russell says, “they were not only absolute masters of their craft, you know, I’m talking like overhead welding and stuff like that, which really takes years and real skill and artistic talent to do right. But they were also really good guys, you know? And they lived in these, you know, just really dirt road Mexican slums.”
In seventh grade, he had studied the works of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and Marx. He read about anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and socialism. The conditions his coworkers lived in, the pittance they were paid, and the immense profits his father made from their labor reinforced in his mind what he had learned earlier in life.
“And so that really opened my eyes about capitalist exploitation,” Russell says, “and the parasite class that takes away what other people earn.”
At the age of 20, he got his GED and joined the US Army at the urging of his father, who promised to put him through college and give him a job if he signed up. He was stationed in Germany and his parents were living in London at the time. When he got leave, he traveled to the UK to visit them.
One time, on the way back from an outing in Edinburgh, Scotland, on an overnight train known as “The Flying Scotsman,” a red-haired actress sat across from him. He had been reading a book about the SAS, the Special Air Service unit of the British Army.
He describes the encounter: “And she was like ‘Oh, so you like the SAS, do you?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, they kill terrorists, don’t they?’ And she said, ‘Well did you ever think maybe they were the terrorists?’ And it wasn’t just because she was so beautiful, and she actually was an actress in Aberdeen and really stunningly beautiful, but I closed the book and I said, ‘No, tell me more.’ And even though she was Scottish, she was a supporter of the Irish struggle, and we talked almost the entire way to London. And that really opened my mind more, and so I started studying about that.”
He waxes philosophical. “You know, it’s a sign of intelligence to have an open mind, and to be able to change your mind. And conversely, you could say it’s the sign of the most abject and complete stupidity to think that you know it all and refuse to consider other possibilities or other ways of looking at things.”
He was in his second year of military service when his father’s business went belly-up. The Mexican peso took a nosedive, his dad lost half his money overnight, the banks called in his loans and he lost his company. But he made good on his promise to give Russell a job.
When Russell got out of the army, his father told him and his younger brother that he was going to spend the last of the money to open a restaurant on South Padre Island and he needed his sons’ help to make sure it didn’t fail.
They called it “The Pantry and Grill Room,” and they served the moneyed crowd with high-end steaks and seafood and expensive wines. The restaurant was a big success.
“And again, I was the waiter there, and I used to make good money,” Russell says. “We could sometimes, between 6PM and midnight, make $300 in tips.”
But it wasn’t long before he was on the move again. He was looking for something bigger than himself. Some way that he could really make a difference in the world, and a regular job just didn’t seem like enough.
In the early 1990’s, Russell moved to Minnesota and became a hard-core activist in the marijuana legalization movement. He wanted to legalize weed not just to smoke, but also to help the environment and the economy. Products such as paper and cloth, and oils for fuel and food, he believed, could be made from hemp instead of less sustainable resources.
He began smuggling weed up from Mexico to Minnesota and he did that for six years before someone snitched, he says. He was arrested and sentenced in 1996 to five years in prison.
“And most of that sentence was because I was the only one on the case that didn’t agree to squeal and cooperate with the cops,” he says, “Everybody else including the kingpin, my boss, got less time than I did.”
Russell says the “kingpin” got three years, and the other smugglers who agreed to be “debriefed” (or agreed to snitch) only got between a year and eighteen months.
In 1996, he was sent to a minimum-security federal prison camp, a “Club Fed.” It was his first offense and none of his crimes involved violence, so he didn’t have to do time in a maximum-security prison.
His wife at the time came to visit him. He told her that he could escape and they could run away together, but she didn’t like that idea, so he agreed to serve out his time “for her.” She promised that she would wait, but she only waited three years.
“And you know, most guys who do a federal case, their wives divorce them immediately. The good ones last about eighteen months on average and mine lasted about three years but eventually she, too, got tired because being married to someone in prison is a lot like being in prison yourself. She was a great girl, we’re still friends, she’s a pretty big-time defense attorney in San Francisco now and I don’t hold anything against her. But once we got divorced, I decided that I wasn’t going to voluntarily hold my hands out for chains, you know, so I did escape, I went on the run for almost 8 years.”
Russell says he was on the lamb for 2,848 days.
“And that was a great time, I went out to northwest Washington. I had a driver’s license in a dead guy’s name. I worked as a lumberjack, I got paid in cash, off the books, and had a lot of great adventures out there. I really, really love northwest Washington, the Great Northwest, Jack London and all that.”
But as they say, nothing lasts forever. Someone snitched on him again, he says, and this time he was taken to a maximum-security federal prison. But the US marshals who arrested him made a mistake, he says. Instead of trying him for the crime of escaping, they put him in maximum security for the original crime.
Russell says he was very lucky.
“Because they put me in a maximum security, and that was a punishment, and you can’t be punished twice for the same crime, they couldn’t give me any more time.”
He served out the remainder of his sentence, which was about a year, and was released in 2009. Then, he returned to Texas and turned over a new leaf, becoming a certified arborist. His experience as a tree climber, tree trimmer and lumberjack qualified him to be a tree doctor and he made around a thousand dollars a week doing sales.
“But then again, I was wondering, ‘is this what I’m going to do for the rest of my life?’ I was just going crazy, man. I wanted to do something. I didn’t want to just live the rest of my life as some bourgeois servant of the upper class.”
The betrayal and gruesome murder of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi by the hands of an enraged mob hit Russell hard.
“Because not many Americans knew, but I did, that Muammar Gaddafi was really a great leader. He really took care of the Libyan people. They had the highest quality of living in Africa. They had free medical care, gasoline was fourteen cents a gallon. Electricity was free for residential, you know. The Libyan government paid 50% of the price of a new car. When newlyweds got married, the Libyan government gave them $50,000! And you know, in America, they say ‘the crazy dictator, Muammar Gaddafi,’ well I wish Americans would think about what crazy dictator would give them 50,000 bucks when they get married, you know, or fourteen cents a gallon for gas.”
Russell didn’t believe what the mainstream media had to say about Libya’s leader.
“I knew that the completely fake stories against him about murdering civilians, you know, and giving Viagra to his soldiers to rape women and stuff, that was just complete and absolute lies.”
Just like when the government and the media claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
“And then, when they murdered him, I was just ashamed to be an American after that, you know.”
His frustration at not being able to do anything boiled over one night while he was living in Austin. Along Burnet Road, one of the city’s most-traveled arteries, there was a billboard not far from his girlfriend’s house. A big recruitment billboard paid for by the US Marine Corps. It had a photo of marines in their blue dress uniforms. “For Honor, For Country,” it declared.
Russell grabbed his tree-climbing gear, clambered up the pole to the billboard and painted “FUCK NATO” in six-foot letters. His message was up for more than a week, he says, and he figures at least 50,000 cars per day must have driven past it.
It didn’t change what had happened in Libya.
But at least he had done something to alleviate the powerlessness he was feeling, to express what he felt.
Then Maidan happened.
There were two terrible atrocities, war crimes, which cemented Russell Bentley’s plan to go to Donbas.
The first was the Odessa Massacre on May 2, 2014 when at least 48 people were killed at the city’s Trade Union Building.
“Odessa is a very pro-Russian city, historically, ethnically, and they were very much against the Maidan coup,” Russell explains, “And they were standing up and protesting peacefully. Peacefully. They were doing, like, an Occupy Wall Street thing where they set up tents in front of the Trade Union Building, and the Ukrainian government, the Kiev regime, bussed in a bunch of really hard-core Nazis from western Ukraine who came up there and they set up an ambush. And they had some guys already hiding inside the Trade Union Building. And then other guys came up and started beating these protesters, setting their tents on fire, stuff like that, and then the doors opened to the Trade Union Building, and somebody goes: ‘Run in the building, you’ll be safe!’”
Inside the building, Russell says, there were no cameras. But there was other evidence of the profane atrocity done to those people, progressives, who just wanted to improve the quality of their lives and live in peace.
“The way that they were mostly murdered, is that there was guys in there with, like, a coffee can full of gasoline, splashed them and then lit them on fire,” Russell recalls. “The bodies that were found, you know, their tennis shoes still had the laces, their blue jeans were still blue, but they were completely burned, like from the waist up, you know?”
And then a month later, on June 2nd, 2014, a Ukrainian SU-25 jet fired rockets at the entrance of the regional administration building in the city of Lugansk. At first, Kiev denied the attack and claimed that an air conditioner inside the building had exploded. But later on, after the International Red Cross and OSCE investigated the attack and presented irrefutable proof that it was an airstrike, the Ukrainians admitted to it.
You can see video of the airstrike here, but please be warned: The video is extremely graphic and depicts horrific violence.
And that was where he saw her.
The woman with the green eyes that looked into his soul.
He sold everything he owned, quit his job and informed his friends and family about his plans. They didn’t believe he would do it at first, he says, but by then “they should have known better.”
In November of 2014, Russell had a final Thanksgiving Dinner with his father, his brother, his aunt and some old friends from South Padre Island, where his family had owned the restaurant. Then, in early December, his father gave him a ride from Dallas down to Houston, Texas, where he boarded a plane bound for Moscow, Russia.
How did everyone feel about his decision to fight the Ukrainians alongside those described in western media as “Russian separatists”?
I asked Russell if he lost friends and family.
“I’ll say one thing,” he replied, “I’ve always been kind of a… I wanted to say ‘outside the box’ but I’ll say ‘outlaw.’ But the real, true, good friends that I had when I left the United States are still real, true, good friends with me to this day, you know? And I’ll say that, because there are people who have the wisdom and the courage to understand that to be able to see reality for what it is, is one of the most important skills and talents of a human being, you know, and so it’s like, the social construct, the social contract, for people in the USA today is ‘I’ll pretend to believe your bullshit if you pretend to believe mine.’”
And Americans will believe almost anything, it seems, except that there are Nazis in Ukraine.
To be continued…
Note: 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.
