Yeah RIP to a real one. Afaik he was never found which means it was most likely neither shelling nor an abduction/assassination by the Ukronazis because they would have bragged about it and made videos like the deranged sadists they are. It’s also unlikely that it would have been the DNR militia or Russian army because he was pretty well liked among them… he had become a bit of a mascot at one point.

Probably the most mundane explanation is the correct one which is that some local criminal elements seeing he was American maybe tried to extort him for money, something went wrong, they panicked and so they made him disappear to save their skins. It’s tragic and sad for him to go out like this after surviving eight years of fighting alongside the Donbass militias against the Nazis.

But these things happen sometimes in war time, and the Donbass republics were always a bit more lawless than the rest of Russia…the legacy of being part of the gangster-run failed state Ukraine for so long i guess.