American Russell Bentley, an employee of the Sputnik propaganda agency, was killed in Donetsk. This was announced by the Chairman of the Public Chamber of the self-proclaimed republic, Alexander Kofman.
“I received the information from my wife "Texas", Lyudmila, she was told , that DNA analysis confirmed a match with Russell,” Kofman said.
Information about Bentley’s death was confirmed by his boss, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
Russell Bentley has participated in the war in eastern Ukraine on the side of pro-Russian separatists since 2014. He most recently worked in the English-language editorial office of the propaganda agency Sputnik. Presumably, the American disappeared in Donetsk on April 8.
According to Bentley's wife Lyudmila, her husband was kidnapped by soldiers from the Russian 5th Tank Brigade in the Petrovsky district of the city. The authors of the ASTRA telegram channel wrote that the American was filming there the consequences of the Ukrainian attack on a military unit.
The deputy head of the Russian Guard in the self-proclaimed DPR, Alexander Khodakovsky, called on the Ministry of Defense to punish the military who killed the Sputnik employee. He later deleted his message, but his repost was preserved in the telegram channel of the Vostok battalion.
“It seems to me that our efforts on ourselves, and sometimes even entering into a deal with our conscience, should be rewarded with exemplary punishment for those who killed Russell Bentley. The military department must show that it knows how not only to remind people of responsibility for discrediting, but also to restore order in its economy,” Khodakovsky wrote in a deleted post.