At first, Russell Bonner Bentley III wasn’t sure he would survive the winter. It was January 2015 in Donetsk, a war-torn city in eastern Ukraine, and the 54-year-old Texan was sequestered inside an abandoned three-story brick monastery, exchanging fire with Ukrainian troops. He and the dozen men fighting with him had been braving freezing temperatures for weeks. From the second floor, Bentley trained his rocket-propelled grenade launcher and his Kalashnikov rifle out of a tiny slit in the side of the building. There was no electricity or running water, and wood-fired stoves provided the only warmth. “The wind came from the south, and it would blow the smoke right back into the rooms,” he recalled.
Bentley had been husky and out of shape when he’d arrived a month earlier, but on a battlefield diet of tinned meat and buckwheat porridge, the weight was melting off. With bright white shoulder-length hair and clear green eyes, Bentley had a well-developed sense of his own myth. He had led something of a swashbuckling life; he’d been an Army engineer based in Germany, a hard-partying musician in South Padre, a marijuana legalization activist in Minnesota and Alaska, and a drug trafficker on the run from the U.S. Marshals. In the early nineties, he’d even vied for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But nothing he’d ever done compared to this. He’d been drawn into the conflict while tapping away at his laptop in early 2014. He was living in Round Rock at the time, and though Russia’s involvement in the fight—first invading Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine, and then supporting pro-Russian separatists who led an uprising in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass—was denounced across the globe, Bentley immersed himself in Russian media sources that blamed the war on “U.S.-backed Nazis.” He imagined the struggle as something akin to the Spanish Civil War, which had been famously portrayed by writers such as Ernest Hemingway as a fight between democracy and fascism. He began fantasizing about banding together with like-minded freedom fighters against so-called “Ukrainian fascism,” and months later he started planning his journey to Donetsk.
He arrived in early December 2014, and after a week he found a militia group, the Vostok Battalion, that was accepting foreign fighters. It was led by Alexander Khodakovsky, a then 42-year-old who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department “for being responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” After enlisting, he went through two weeks of rudimentary military training and then settled into a unit called Sut’ Vremeni, or “Essence of Time,” a Stalinist communist movement. When he was asked to select his nom de guerre, Bentley, a fourth-generation Texan, anointed himself “Texas,” pronounced in Russian like the Spanish “Tejas.”
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https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/son-wealthy-businessman-foot-soldier-vladimir-putin-russia-hacking/
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