The widow of a Texas man who spent years aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine only to apparently get murdered by Russian troops is now appealing directly to Vladimir Putin to find his mutilated remains.
Lyudmila Bentley, the wife of Dallas native turned Putin fanboy Russell Bentley, appeared in a new video Wednesday in which she speaks in front of a flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the unrecognized territory in eastern Ukraine where Bentley first joined forces with Russian proxies back in 2014.
Bentley, who obtained Russian citizenship in 2020 and had been working closely with Kremlin-controlled media, was “abducted” earlier this month by Russian troops and later reported dead by local officials and the battalion with which he’d fought. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan also confirmed his death, without providing details on how he died. Unconfirmed reports circulated among Russian military bloggers suggested Bentley had suffered a gruesome death at the hands of Russian troops who mistook him for a spy.
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His wife says she hasn’t yet seen his remains, or even proof of his death.
“I know that his remains have been seen. But then I’m told that there are no remains. How is that?” Lyudmila Bentley said in a video shared on Telegram.
She is asking the Russian president to do something to punish those who killed her husband—and to help her retrieve what’s left of his body.
“Everyone knows that as soon as you appeal directly to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then all problems get solved,” she said. “That’s why I want to appeal to the president of the Russian Federation with a request to provide maximum assistance to find my husband, either alive, if it’s possible, or to give me his remains so that I can bury him.”
“It’s more than hell,” she said of his death and the murky circumstances around it. “I beg you please, help.”
