Russia sends members of its military behind bars for the murder of a US soldier in Ukraine

In early December, 91 countries around the world, including Slovakia and the United States, called on Moscow in a UN resolution to "ensure the immediate, safe and unconditional return of all Ukrainian children who have been forcibly displaced or deported" to occupied Ukrainian territory, to Russia, Belarus or North Korea.

Overall, Russian soldiers, the occupation administration in the occupied territory of Ukraine, as well as the Russian authorities have committed a number of war crimes since 2014 and especially since 2022, but the perpetrators have not received any condemnation from their own, with the exception of one case. Until 8 December 2025.

Communist cowboy

American Russell Bonner Bentley was born in 1960 in Austin, Texas, and was, in his own words , the black sheep of the family because of his leftist worldview. He visited Cuba in the mid-1990s and embraced communist ideology as his own. In late 2013 and early 2014, he became an activist for the legalization of marijuana.

Impressed by a video purportedly showing a woman in eastern Ukraine injured during a clash between Ukrainian armed forces and Russian separatists, he moved to Donetsk in 2014. By the end of that year, in his own words, he began "liberating" Ukraine and "fighting fascism" in the separatist ranks, for which he obtained citizenship of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and stopped fighting in 2017.

In 2020, Bentley was granted Russian citizenship and has been posting on social media without a break since 2015, where he has reached nearly 20 thousand subscribers. Shortly after the invasion, he began working as a correspondent for Sputnik, a Russian portal that is part of RT television (formerly Russia Today).

On April 6, 2024, he posted a new photo of himself with the caption, "Still a real Donbass cowboy." Two days later, on April 8, he was tortured to death.

Murder of civilians

As part of the Volnovakh massacre in the Donetsk region, Russian soldiers Stanislav Rau and Anton Sopov exterminated the Kapkanets, a Ukrainian family of nine, in a house the family refused to leave in late October 2023. In November 2024, the two were sentenced to life imprisonment at a military court in Rostov-on-Don.

Although it is now common in Russia, and even recommended by law enforcement authorities, to evade responsibility and travel directly from detention or prison to the front, the pair of convicted soldiers were not allowed to do so. This was the first and, for a long time, the only case in which the Russian side convicted its own soldiers for crimes against civilians in Ukraine.

The second and, for the time being, the most recent case is the conviction of four Russian soldiers by a military court in occupied Donetsk on 8 December. Vitaliy Vansyatskiy, Andrei Iordanov and Vladislav Agaltsev arrested Bentley on 8 April 2024 and charged him with treason in favour of Ukraine.

They put a bag over his head, put him in a car and drove him away, reporting his detention to their commander. In the ensuing interrogation, the trio of Russians tortured the 64-year-old American, as a result of which he died.

They loaded the American's body into the trunk of the car and left it to explode. The day after, Iordanov and Vladimir Bazhin always came to the car and additionally burned Bentley's body, whose remains have not yet been found. Vansyatskii and Iordanov were sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for "abuse of power resulting in death", Agaltsev to 11 years and Bazhin to a year and a half in prison.

Russian General Pavel Klimenko, the superior of the convicted soldiers, was killed by a Ukrainian drone on 6 November 2024. According to an Astra release, the American was martyred in a concentration camp run by Klimenko. Klimenko's troops at the camp also tortured their own "Five Hundreds," according to multiple sources.

Recall that the code "200" denotes dead soldiers, "300" in turn denotes wounded, and the code "500" is used to denote defectors or soldiers who show indecision or cowardice in combat.

The more famous Yankee

Bentley, however, was not the first known American on the Russian side to find death in Ukraine. Back in April 2024, 21-year-old Michael Gloss, a former member of the U.S. Navy , died at the front.

His mother, meanwhile, is Juliane Gallina Gloss, the CIA's deputy director for digital innovation. The news was first reported by the Russian opposition website Vazhneye istorii, published in English as Important Stories (iStories). The report was also picked up by the Washington Post.

In 2023, Gloss joined the Rainbow Family movement and lived in hippie camps. As iStories found out, Gloss dropped out of college, moved to Italy, then traveled to Israel, from where he was deported. He arrived in Russia in August 2023.

After his visa expired, he signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense and fought in Ukraine as part of Russia's 137th Airborne Regiment from December 2023. He was killed in the ranks of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation during fighting in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on April 4, 2024, and according to Putin, he - like Klimenko - was killed by a Ukrainian drone.

Gloss was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin, which Putin, through Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff, presented to Gloss's mother in the summer of 2025. The Russian president has not commented on the death of Russell Bonner Bentley.