The preliminary investigation by Russia’s Investigative Committee accused four Russian servicemen of the kidnap and murder of the American Russell Bentley, a Russian “war correspondent.”
The Russian state news agency TASS reported on Friday that the Main Military Investigative Department of Moscow’s Investigative Committee confirmed that four Russian servicemen have been charged in connection with the kidnap, torture and murder of the American Russell Bentley in April, while he worked for the Spunik propaganda outlet in the Donbas region.
The investigation found that on April 8, Bentley, who was known as the “Donbas Cowboy,” was abducted while filming the aftermath of a Ukrainian artillery strike in Donetsk’s Petrovsky District.
It is alleged that three Russian servicemen Vitaly Vansyatsky, Vladislav Agaltsov and Andrey Iordanov, a tank crew from Moscow’s 5th Zakharchenko Brigade violently kidnapped Bentley, took him to an unidentified location where they interrogated and tortured him which, in the words of the committees indictment involved “actions that clearly went beyond their authority and which through negligence resulted in the death of the victim.”
The charges also say that, in trying to cover up the incident they put the American’s body into a VAZ-2115 / Lada Samara car which they then blew up using TNT blocks. The next day Vansyatsky ordered another serviceman in his unit, Vladimir Bazhin, to remove and hide Bentley’s remains, which have not been recovered but his car was later found, inside which was a baseball cap, glasses and a broken phone.
I doubt that that was intentional from a Russian institutional position. Sounds like random low-level Russian soldiers running amok.
It does kind of highlight the fact that the law-and-order situation in the area is probably not great and there are probably a number of soldiers doing a number of unpleasant things to people in the area. Not that that really needed a lot of clarification at this point, but you figure that stuff like this has probably been happening to people in the occupied territories throughout the war. Been years of that by now, and that this one only grabs attention because the guy was a visible media figure working for a major Russian state-run media outlet associated with the war effort…
Just to clarify though, this is the same Russian institution that conscripted soldiers from their prisons - so it’s not like the army can act shocked at finding “a few bad apples”.
Penal battalions aren’t a new idea for anyone, and they rarely get to drive tanks, the problem is far more deeply systemic than that.