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The tragicomic tale of a down-on-his-luck Texan who reinvented himself as a renegade war hero in a fake Russian republic took an unexpected turn this week when he was allegedly abducted by Russian troops—after apparently being accused of being a CIA spy.
Russell Bentley, also known as “Texas,” is perhaps the last person one would expect to have pulled off cunning spycraft for the nearly 10 years he’s been living among Russian fighters in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region. A Dallas native with a conviction on drug charges back home, Bentley briefly seized international headlines back in 2014 when he was spotted in a cowboy hat with Russian fighters and spewing Kremlin propaganda about “Nazis” in Ukraine. He obtained Russian citizenship in 2020 after remodeling himself as a combat-vet-turned-“journalist” for Kremlin-controlled media.
News of his disappearance earlier this month largely went under the radar until his wife, Lyudmila Bentley, went public Tuesday with claims he’d been snatched and taken hostage by Russian troops.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com