Mira Terada, head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, interviewed Russell Bentley, an American citizen from Texas who participated in the defense of Donetsk from the Ukrainian army. The head of the Foundation learned from Bentley about how American propaganda is trying to hide the war crimes of NATO and Ukraine, how nationalism has affected the Ukrainian military and about the reasons for the prolongation of the conflict by the Ukrainian side. Bentley also spoke about fake Anglo-American news and the silencing of the atrocities of the Ukrainian army and national battalions.
Mira Terada: Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the time to interview for the Foundation to battle injustice. Please tell us a few words about yourself and how you ended up in the Donbas.
Russell Bentley: My name is Russell Bentley. My soldier’s name was Texas. I came from Texas to Donetsk in December of 2014. A week after I got here, I joined the Vostok Battalion people’s militia, started serving in combat on December 31, 2014, at a position called the Monastery, about 400 meters from the new terminal at the Donetsk airport. At that time, the airport was still held by the Ukrainian so-called cyborgs. I was there when the Sparta battalion, along with the help of Vostok took the airport back from the cyborgs. It’s been ours ever since. I served for about a year in the Naval Russian Defense Forces, first with the Vostok Battalion and the Suit Remedy Combat Unit. Later Suit remedy transferred to Battalion Spetsnaz. I served with them for about ten months and then I served in 2017 with them for four months as MVD police soldiers on the frontline on the Avdeevka front. Since then I’ve been doing humanitarian aid and working as a war correspondent. I’m accredited war correspondent here in the DPR and I write counter propaganda make videos. It’s a very difficult situation right now, especially since this operation Z started. The United States is blocking all kinds of honest news from here and also they’re blocking funds from coming to the Russia or the East from the United States. It’s a hard situation. The information war is a real war. Our enemies are serious and use dirty tricks, but we are going to win.
M.T.: In one of your interviews you stated that you decided to leave the United States after realizing the horror that your country did on the territory of other states. How did you manage not to succumb to the propaganda of the American media?
R.B.: Well, I was very fortunate. I actually dropped out of school after the seventh grade. I never watched very much TV. Growing up, I was born in 1960. So I grew up at the time of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement in America. I taught myself, I spent hours every day in the library reading books and I read books by Martin Luther King and by Che Guevara and also Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. And I understood that there was a whole different perspective in the world besides that, which almost everyone in the United States believed. When I joined the Army, the U.S. Army in 1980 at the age of 20, I took a GED test, which is a high school equivalency test. And even though I’d only gone to school for seven years, I scored a 98% on that test, so I had educated myself pretty well. I went to college in the 1990s at a 4.0 hundred percent grade point average there. So I got to say that the American education system was never as good as the Soviet system, but it was pretty decent back in the day at least they taught me how to read well. And nowadays it’s a diseducation system. It’s like a brainwashing system. They not only don’t teach you how to think critically, which I taught myself how to do, but they try and teach you not to think critically, to just accept what you’re told. Whatever the end whatever the teacher says is the correct answer on the test. I remember one time there was a thing published in the United States where a teacher told his class and this is like in a high school class, the teacher told the class that a kilometer was longer than a mile. And one of the students stood up and kept arguing with him and saying, “no, it’s not longer, the kilometer is shorter than a mile.” And the kid ended up getting discipline and by the principal for not agreeing with the teacher. And that’s like a perfect example of what the U.S. education system is. So fortunately, I have avoided that, and I avoided watching a lot of television growing up. So I was able to educate myself.
M.T.: The crimes committed by made the NATO countries and the United States are really striking in their brutality. Tell us, please, how does American propaganda justify the actions of the American military content sent abroad?
R.B.: They justify it or they try to justify it by telling absolute lies. You can just simply look back at the history of the last 30 or 40 years. The attack on Yugoslavia was based on lies that was completely unjustified. The attack on Iraq with the fake story of WMD that they guaranteed that that Saddam Hussein had, but there was none ever found. The attack on Libya, where they said Muammar Gaddafi was murdering his own civilians. Also a complete lie. The same thing in the Maidan. It’s a fact that the snipers that worked on the Maidan and killed more than 100 people were paid, armed and directed by the by the U.S. government, U.S. CIA. Some of those snipers have even come forward and confessed. Since Operation Z has started, there’s been at least four cases that I know of where like, for instance, on Monday, the 14th of March, Ukrainian army shot a Tochka-U, the anti-personnel cluster bomb at the center of Donetsk. They were aiming for the administration building and they had, in fact, in the days before set up false social media accounts that were telling people, “hey, if your father or husband or brother is in the army, come to the administration in building at noon on Monday to get information about, you know, your loved one that’s in the Army.” There was even text messages sent out to women whose loved ones were serving in the Donbass Defense Forces. And I know that for a fact, because a friend of mine was wounded, and I went to visit him in the hospital shortly after the 14th attack. And his daughter was there, too. And she showed me the text message on her phone saying “go to the administration building.” So the Tochka-U attack was first of all, they set up a situation where they expected a lot of civilian women to be at a certain place. And that’s where they fired the Tochka-U. We hit our air defenses hit it, and we disabled it. But of the Tochka-U has 50 cassettes of cluster bombs. Only one of them went off, but that one and it didn’t hit the area that was targeted, but it hit a couple of hundred meters away on University Avenue and that one killed 24 people and wounded about 30 more. It’s a very deadly weapon, it would have been 50 times worse had we not intercepted it. But the next day, a photograph that was taken of a man weeping over the body of his wife was published in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, and it showed him weeping there. This is not a lie of the difference of a few degrees of interpretation being misunderstood or something. This is a 180-degree opposite of the truth, lie. And it’s not the only case. Ukrainians shot on March 30th another Tochka-U bomb at Donetsk. It landed on an apartment building. It blew up three floors of that apartment building. And again, the next day in the New York Post headline news “Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians continue” and they show a photograph of the apartment that was hit by the Ukrainian bomb against DPR citizens. So that’s how they justify it, by simply lying completely to idiots that are too stupid to think critically or to investigate for themselves. You just simply swallow whatever they’re told by the media or the government. And I want you explain what that problem is for the citizens of the United States. But here’s the problem. If you eat shit for long enough, you get used to it. But if you eat it for too long, you learn to start liking it. A lot of people in the United States have started to like it. They have no critical thinking, they don’t want to know the truth. It’s the same thing with like the 9/11. The physical evidence is unquestionable that it was done from inside with controlled demolition, but people don’t want to know that. It’s more easy, and convenient and comfortable for them to just believe the lie. The social contract in the United States these days between people is pretty much, you know, I’ll pretend to believe your bullshit if you pretend to believe mine. Sorry if I’m using bad words, but it’s the only way that you can really express what it is.
M.T.: The influence of Western countries is also evident in the example of the Ukrainian conflict. Millions, if not billions of US taxpayer dollars are being allocated to finance and train Ukrainians serviceman and nationalists. What do ordinary Americans think about this?
R.B.: I haven’t been to the United States in almost eight years now, so I don’t really know. I don’t really watch very much U.S. media anymore. They simply swallow whatever lie they’re fed by the government and media. I’m sure the most majority of people there think that Russia is the new German Wehrmacht army, when actually it’s just the exact opposite. The United States literally is the Fourth Reich. They have controlled this war in Ukraine since Maidan, since 2014. Nothing has happened here. It was not on the absolute complete orders of Joe Biden and the CIA and the State Department. That includes the massacre in Odessa, that includes the airstrike on Lugansk on June 2, that includes MH 17, which was shot down. I did an investigation. I went where it landed, and I interviewed eyewitnesses who said, “yes, there was still Ukrainian Air Force jets right behind that airliner, and they shot it down.” It wasn’t a book by the Russians or the separatists or even the Ukrainians. Eventually the Russians, who had first also verified it with their radar images from Rostov. They tried in kind of like the under the table politics, they came up with this story about, “oh, we found a piece of the book and it had a serial number from Ukrainian warehouses.” But and that wasn’t true, that what they were doing was trying to give the Ukrainians a face-saving way to take responsibility because they could say, “we shot the book, but it was accident.” But if you’re shooting down an airliner eight miles high above the clouds from five kilometers away with a jet fighter, there’s no way it can be an accident. But you can make people think they accidentally press the wrong button or something with a book. But the true story is the true fact is that airliner MH 17 was shot down on purpose on the orders of the U.S. It couldn’t have been done without the help of the U.S. That’s the worst war crime of this war still to this day. 298 civilians were murdered just to make a false flag against Russia. And again the propaganda was already set up ahead of time as soon as the plane came down. the SBU you published on YouTube, a so-called intercepted phone call of separatist officers discussing saying, “oh, we accidentally shot down in a civilian plane.” But it was later analyzed. And the first thing was it was produced the day before the plane was shot down. The second thing is that audio analysis went through and they could prove that it was the clips from multiple different conversations that were stitched together. Mm hmm. This is the kind of propaganda that we’re fighting against.
M.T.: You mentioned that U.S. was in Ukraine since 2014 and exactly in 2014 Victoria Nuland stated that since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has invested at least $5 billion dollars to support democracy in Ukraine. How do you assess the influence of the American establishment and Ms. Nuland on the events in the Kiev in 2013 and 2014?
R.B.: Well of course they’d been working long before the Maidan. The color revolution with the Yulia Tymoshenko was almost ten years before that. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union these so-called NGOs, the State Department, a National Endowment for Democracy, all these guys, it’s called in English astroturfing, when these terrible chemical corporations start their volunteer organization and call for the better. Save nature organization. This is what our enemies do. It’s their absolute technique. They use the exact opposite of the truth. Everything they say is a lie. Even if they say something that’s factual, they do it only with the intention of deceiving the idiots that believe them. The USA was working long, long before Maidan to make exactly what happened in Maidan happened. They’ve been supporting the U.N. and the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators since the end of World War II.
M.T.: For the past eight years, resident and civilian infrastructure of Donbas have been the target of Ukrainian servicemen and nationalists groups controlled by them. Why, in your opinion, did the political leaders of Ukraine give orders to exterminate the civilian population of Donbas?
R.B.: There’s no such thing as political leaders in Ukraine. Those orders came directly from the United States, and particularly in the early years from Joe Biden. The order was given from Washington, DC to suppress and destroy all political opposition using any means necessary, using the same techniques that the German Nazis used in the Second World War, which is what we see, attacks against infrastructure, attacks against civilians just to terrorize the civilians. The mass murder in Odessa on May 2, 2014, is a perfect example. They did it. They not only murdered all those people, but they did it on video. They did it publicly as to set an example to terrorize people, to show that even peaceful protesters this was what will happen to you if you do not submit, if you do not bow down to your new masters.
M.T.: But why did the Western media cover up the genocide of the peaceful population of Donbas?
R.B.: Because the Western media is absolutely complicit in all these crimes. You can’t call them the media. They’re a propaganda machine. They say what their owners and masters say. In the United States four or five corporations own pretty much every single outlet of media, of radio, newspapers, television, Internet. Benito Mussolini once said, the father of the founder of the fascist party in Italy, you once said that fascism would better be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. And the United States, they have absolutely no consideration for the welfare of the people. I often ask my friends in America, I say, “let me ask you something. Did the U.S. government do something to actually improve the lives of American people, of average American people?” And you know what? They don’t have an answer for that. They don’t have an answer for that because the U.S. government, everything that they say is a lie and everything that they do only makes things worse. It sounds like an absolute exaggeration or something. But really, I’m still waiting for someone to contradict me on that.
M.T.: How do you assess the influence of ultra-right ideology on the Ukrainian army soldiers? Why does a country that lost millions of its citizens in the war against fascism support as strongly the activities of nationalist organizations?
R.B.: I want to say that it’s a myth. They’ve left swastika flags in their barracks and on their military positions. They say “Slava Bandera”, they say “Heil Hitler”. They have almost icons of Hitler. The orthodox icon with a photograph of Hitler. I’ve seen the photos, I’ve got the photographs. These people and more so than just stepping around wearing a Nazi uniform like some weirdo in their mother’s basement, these guys actually use genuine Nazi techniques of mass murder and terrorism. They do intend to commit genocide. They’re not only throughout the entire Ukrainian military now. They’ve sold their souls or they’ve lost their minds or whatever. It’s based on decades of anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, anti-communist propaganda. It’s sickeningly stupid to hear politicians and media and even academicians, I’ve heard, I saw a video the other day of two professors from prestigious American universities having a big seminar or something and saying, “there’s no Nazis in Ukraine. The president of Ukraine is Jewish so how can there be Nazis?” For these people that are saying that, they’re not stupid, they know they’re lying, they know that it’s a lie. Most hardcore Nazi battalions, no one, he’s Jewish do. But, you know, these people they think they’re ubermenschen and they think that they have the right to decide who lives and who dies. It doesn’t matter what race or what religion or what nationality they are. They’re against humanity, I’m a Russian Orthodox Christian, and I believe in God and I believe in the devil. I truly believe that this is a war of evil against good. We’re on the good guy side. God is on our side. There’s so many times that I really had to call it a miracle. Bullet had a tracer fly 30 centimeters from my head one night. I had a 120-millimeter artillery round land, hit the wall in the room that I was in and blow through the wall. It was a miracle I wasn’t killed. I had snipers sneak up on me. I didn’t discover him until he was 50 meters away from me. I really believe in guardian angels, and I really believe that this is a war between good and evil. And we’re on the good side.
M.T.: There is an opinion that America regularly adds fuel to international conflicts with one purpose – to earn as much money as possible on the sale of weapons and equipment. Do you think the Western establishment views the Ukrainian conflict as another investment project?
R.B.: Of course, they did. And not just the United States, the British too. The enlarged tank missiles, anti-tank missiles that they have been providing to Ukraine, of course, not for free. Those missiles and it’s been proven, it’s been shown on international media, have a 20-year shelf life. They can be used in the day after 20 years. They’re not safe to use anymore or they don’t work. And the missiles that the British sent to Ukraine were 19 years old, so they’re selling them their garbage. They’re selling them garbage at full price. It’s the same with the United States. The Stinger missiles, they say, don’t really work too well. They say that the Javelin anti-tank missiles are obsolete and not good. Americans are famous for making very low-quality military systems. The military industrial complex, which is a term that was first used by Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech for and he warned against the combination of arms makers and government power. There was a US general, Marine general named Smedley Butler, who was one of the highest decorated Marines in U.S. history. He rose up from lieutenant to be the commandant of the Marine Corps. In the thirties he served through the First World War, the Philippines, the Spanish Civil War. He wrote a book called War is a Racket. A racket, it’s like a crooked scheme or something. And he really spelled it out. He said that the U.S. military is just like the muscle for a bunch of gangsters. They go wherever they want to, to countries to steal whatever they want to steal, put down popular rebellions. He said in the first World War, there was a military company that was supplying equipment to the U.S. Army and they just sat there in a warehouse till they rotted.
M.T.: How true is the judgment that by supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian servicemen, the United States is trying to protect its laboratories, which have lost their secrecy since the beginning of the military operation? What, in your opinion, was actually developed in those labs?
R.B.: There’s a few people and I’m one of them who’ve been talking about those biological labs for instance. It’s coming out right now that there was a few of us that knew what actually going on. They were developing pathogens and they had even collected DNA of Russian and Slavic people in order to try and make a disease that would specifically attack Slavic people. And they were studying how to make use drones that could fly over and spray out of aerosol, poisons. They were studying how to infect mosquitoes that they could release to come into Russia or eastern Ukraine, Donbass, and infect people. First of all, it’s absolutely against international law. Second of all, it’s a genuine war crime. These are prohibited weapons. Biological weapons are absolutely prohibited. Third of all, it’s criminally insane because to play with nature, to try and make a weapon out of nature, of course, it’s always going to backfire. There’s always going to be unintended consequences. Forth of all, it’s absolutely genuinely evil. This is truly evil.
M.T.: Recently persecution and attacks on the representatives of the Orthodoxy have intensified on the territory of Ukraine. Priests beaten and abducted. People are afraid to visit churches. Recently Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine introduced a bill banning the activities of Russian Orthodox Church. In your opinion, what is the reason for this? Fascism and Orthodox are not compatible?
R.B.: Of course, they’re not, because again one side is as an orthodox Christian, I’ve been a spiritual man all my life. I’ve studied all of the great religions, Zen Buddhism, the Native American religion. I actually lived with Native Americans for two years, joined their tribe. You have an Indian name with you there, religious ceremonies every week for two years, over 100 times. I’ve also studied, I’ve read the Bible many times, the complete all of it. I’ve studied the Koran, I’ve read the entire Koran. I’ve lived with Muslim friends, fasted for Ramadan with them and gone to prayers with them. I’ve also taken a look at Catholic and Protestant Christianity. First of all, there’s a lot of good Catholic people. I have some great friends there. They have an organization called the Catholic Workers. They work with homeless people in major cities. They do the work of Jesus Christ. They help people without pay, without asking any thanks, without judgment and they’re great people. And there’s a lot of great Catholics. I spent a lot of time in Mexico, and there’s a lot of good Catholics there, too. But the Catholic Church as an organization it’s satanic. It’s filled with child molesters, pedophiles, homosexuals, true degenerates. It’s a multibillion-dollar organization that doesn’t really do anything for the poor of humanity in, to even a fraction of what it could do. Two or three popes ago was this dude, Ratzinger, who had been in the Hitler Youth, who wore a Nazi uniform and said “Heil Hitler” when he was a youngster. But if there’s a more than a billion Catholics in the world, how can the church not find somebody better to be the representative and leader of that church than somebody who said “Heil Hitler” and was an actual Nazi even when he was a kid? The Catholic Church was always repugnant to me, even though there’s good Catholic people. The Protestant churches in the United States are every bit as horrible as the Catholic Church. They have in Texas especially, and in the South they have this thing called megachurches, and they have these churches that are as big as football stadiums that 20, 30, 50 thousand people can come to.
M.T.: Joel Osteen?
R.B.: Yes, he’s one of them. These dudes, they make billions of dollars or at least hundreds of millions. They have multiple mansions. They have Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. They have private jets, and they teach what’s the worst is they have this philosophy. It’s called a prosperity gospel. And they tell all these people that come there, they say, “You know what? You’re rich because you’re good. God is rewarding you because you’re good. And that’s why you’re rich. And all these poor people, they’re poor because they’re bad. And if they would only be good, then they would be rich like us.” And it’s complete hypocrisy. It’s another absolute lie. It is exactly the opposite of what Jesus Christ truly taught and how he how he truly lived. I despise that kind of religion. And then I came here and I met my God father. He’s an Orthodox priest. He’s also a warrior. He served in “Vostok” with me. I met Father Theophon, who is also a priest or a monk, rather, who was captured and tortured by SBU when he was in the monastery in Nikolayevka during the early days of the war. He would call to Donetsk and he would warn them. He saw the Ukrains setting up in the fields outside a town. And he would say, “Look, they’re here.” He was tortured and later released in a prisoner exchange. I admire that. These are true examples of the Christianity that Jesus taught. I’m very happy and very proud to be a Russian Orthodox. I think it’s the true religion. It’s my theory and it’s just kind of something I thought of. I don’t really have any evidence to base it on. In the King James Bible, Western Catholic Bible, there’s about 20 years of the life of Jesus Christ that’s just simply not mentioned in the Bible. It’s my opinion that probably during those 20 years when he wasn’t being mentioned by the people in the Middle East, it’s because he was here in Crimea, Donbass.
M.T.: Since the beginning of special military operation, Western propaganda has only intensified. Literally every few days Kiev broadcasts another production aimed at discrediting Russian servicemen and their mission. As an anti-propaganda specialist what do you think about this?
R.B.: Of course they would be doing it anyway, trying to discredit Russian servicemen, but they really have to do it and they have to intensify it because of the proof, the real videos that Ukrainian Nazis are posting themselves of the torture and murder of prisoners and civilians which has been going on throughout this war, but has also extremely intensified since the operation began. People are getting to see this. The woman that was discovered in the basement of the Azov base in Mariupol that had a swastika burned into her back before she was murdered. Russian military prisoners had swastikas burned or carved into them. This guys are saying that all of the wounded Russian prisoners should be castrated. There is a video of the mass execution of all the guys in their underwear in the back of the truck, the video of the guys being shot in the legs and in the groin and being left to bleed out while they’re being gagged and yelled at. These are horrendous crimes. And these are not fake.
M.T.: The censorship of Western social networks has reached its apogee. Any publication that doesn’t coincide with Washington’s position is immediately deleted and the account that posted this information on the network is blocked. Please tell us about your experience of encountering censorship on the Web.
R.B.: When I started working as a war correspondent in 2015 first it was my Twitter account that was deleted in 2016. I had a PayPal that was also deleted. Patreon was also deleted. I did a GoFundMe fund raiser to raise money to edit and publish a book that I had written about my time as a soldier. It was for $9,000. I had two months to raise the money. In the first month I’d already raised $7,000 and then the BBC wrote an article saying “The Communist soldier uses charity to fund his war”. They completely lied. And then it got picked up by major media in the United States, extreme pressure was put on GoFundMe. And eventually they said all the money that those people had donated, they sent it back to them. Facebook deleted me about two years ago. I’d been on there for 12 years, had 5000 followers. They completely erased my account for completely bogus reasons. It’s like community standards. They never even tell you exactly what it was. They just say “all right, you are a volunteer”. Just at the beginning of Operation Z, I made a short 40-second video. I was at the front lines and I was by a column of Russian armor, and I just made this short video. I said “We’re here, we’re tough, we’re ready. We’re using only about 10% of our military potential. We’re being careful not to hurt civilians, but we’re going to win this war. We’re going to help the good guys, liberate the good guys from the Nazi and kick their ass.” That video got 150,000 views on my YouTube channel in less than one day. I got 15,000 new subscribers in less than one day, and that video was deleted the next day. My entire YouTube channel was deleted the day after that. The information war is a real war. Unfortunately the West has not a monopoly, but a vast majority of control over major international social media and communications. Even right now, as we’re speaking on Skype, I have a very hard time sometimes with doing an interview on Skype because it starts freezing or drops out or something like that. That’s made by Microsoft. I have to wonder if there’s not somebody sitting there going “okay, he’s talking now, press the button.” There’s also a communication program called Zoom. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. It’s blocked in Donetsk. I can sometimes use it, if I use a VPN and say I’m in Sweden or something like that. Most of the time it’s very glitchy. That’s exactly what they do. They’re trying to conceal the truth of their crimes. They’re trying to oppress or erase anybody that’s telling the truth, and particularly me. I’m not trying to brag or anything like that, but I have a talent for reaching people on an emotional level. I’m serious about what I’m doing, and I’m not trying to explain the context in the big picture about what’s going on. I’m not like some dudes that just say “oh, look, here’s a dead body” just to get views or get money. I came here in 2014. I was 54 years old. I didn’t even really speak Russian. I wasn’t in very good shape. When I came here specifically to join the Army to be in combat, I didn’t expect to live through the winter. I really expected that it was the people’s militia then against the Ukrainian army, which is the third largest army in Europe. An old man that doesn’t speak Russian going against the third biggest army in Europe. To be honest, I did not expect to live through the winter, but I came anyway because I decided I would rather stand beside the heroes here and die with them, then sit at home in the United States and be complicit in these crimes and think that I was doing a revolutionary act by hitting like on a Facebook page. I didn’t come here to be an Internet star or to make money. I came here to defend the people of Donbass and to do to kill Nazis. And that’s what I’ve done. I make no apologies about it.
M.T.: You predicted an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine back in 2020. Tell us, please, what prerequisites did you manage to see than?
R.B.: I just understood that it was inevitable, that there was never going to be any peace talks, that the people of Donbas would have fought against their own administration or even the Russians if somebody tried to force them to go back under the power of Ukraine. There was there was never any likelihood of the Russians doing that, but we literally would have fought against anybody that tried to make us do that. I knew that our enemy was Nazis and that had no intentions of doing anything but coming here and slaughtering everyone here, just like the Germans did in the Second World War. They wanted the land, but not the people. At the end of 2021 I saw the build up along the Donbass front. I’m sitting less than, you know, ten kilometers from Ukrainian army positions. Right now the Donbass front is all along the major cities of Donbass: Donetsk, Lugansk, Makeevka, Gorlovka. They’re sitting literally on the city limits. I just thought to myself that when the Ukrainian army came in 2014 and 2015 to try and take back Donbas, they were annihilated in the open guns and came back to do that again. I figured if I was a Ukrainian general and my task was to take back the land without consideration for the human cost of civilians of the opposing side, I could get my troops into the city mixed up with civilians. Russia’s military advantages would be over because missiles and rockets, you can’t use those in proximity of civilians without expecting casualties. I was correct. That was exactly their plan to come right into the cities and it’s what they’re doing in Mariupol. They use civilians as human shields, they’re setting up, they’re firing, they’re not letting civilians leave the combat area I’ve actually seen in recent days a NATO training manual that was found in Azov base. In this manual, there was literally like in traffic figures in an apartment building. And on the first few floors was the bridge. Still, it was one big one and two little ones on the first and second floor. And then on the third floor is the black figure shooting out the window. So they were trained to use civilians as a shield. I knew that if the Ukrainians were planning on the attack and I knew that it was absolutely vital, not only the lives of people who went Donbass, but to the defense of Russia itself. Russia make its move preemptively and like Vladimir Putin once said, he learned when he was a kid on the streets of Leningrad, in the fight you have to strike first. Thank God and thank Vladimir Putin that they did strike first. They saved literally hundreds of innocent lives by doing so.
M.T.: There is an opinion that the current Ukrainian leader refuses to sign peace agreements with the Russian Federation only because every day of the military special operation brings him millions of dollars from NATO countries and the United States. Do you think Ukrainian political leadership benefits from what is happening on the territory of the country?
R.B.: Of course they do. And they’re the only ones. This guy is putting $100 million into his bank account in Central America. It’s a German bank. He’s getting money not only by stealing it from the Ukrainian national budget. He’s getting bribes, from oligarchs. And, of course, he’s getting money from the United States. Now he’s a billionaire. They say he’s got over $1.2 billion in bank account. He’s got a mansion in Miami. Once you become a billionaire, you become a genuine enemy of humanity. Because every billionaire on this planet is a thief, because no one can be smart enough or work hard enough to actually earn $1,000,000,000. You can only scam it or steal it. So every billionaire on this planet is a thief. And remember, most of these dudes, they don’t just have $1 billion, that’s chump change. This guys with hundreds of billions of dollars. They get it with theft of resources that can literally qualify as a crime against humanity because with all these stolen billions you could have fed all the starving kids in the world with that money, you could have built a thousand hospitals or schools. Instead of that they waste money. It’s really disgusting. I’m a communist and I believe that in a civilized society there should be a level of quality of life below which no citizen should have to live. They should have a basic food, housing, education, medical care. The way that you pay for that limit on how poor people can be is by making a limit on how rich people can be. If you asked me, maybe, a million? No, $1,000,000 ain’t that much anymore. People can work hard and deserve and earn $1,000,000. So what? Maybe 20 million? Well, that’s quite a bit of money, but people can earn that kind of money. So what? 50 million. Well, that’s, getting to be a whole lot of money there. 100 million. Yeah, that’s enough. 100 million is enough. Anybody who thinks they deserve or that they earned more than 100 million bucks, they have to do something really impressive and good to convince me of that. And plus they’d have to do some really hard talking to convince me that they need any more than that, that they need more than 100 million. The job I left in the United States when I came here, I made $50,000 a year, which was considered pretty good money back then. It’s considered great money now, because everybody in the United States is getting so poor. A guy that has $1,000 million looks at somebody that spends a year working for $50,000, it’s like a regular person looks at an ant. They consider themselves to be super humans or something just because they stole that money. It’s not just the United States, all billionaires are enemies of humanity.