Dubbed the “merchant of death,” he is serving a 25-year prison sentence for building an arms-smuggling empire that spanned the globe.
In a prison in Marion, Illinois, in a special unit called “Little Guantanamo,” a man who speaks six languages and has been dubbed the “merchant of death” is serving a 25-year sentence for building an arms-smuggling empire that spanned the globe. .
His name is Viktor Bout. And his homeland, Russia, wants him back as soon as possible. The question is why.
The 55-year-old Bout is the most notorious arms dealer of his time and is accused that the weapons that have made him rich have fueled wars in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
This week, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the United States had offered Russia “a substantial offer” to secure the release of two Americans held in Moscow, WNBA basketball player Brittney Griner and security adviser Paul Whelan. Russian officials have hinted that they expect a prisoner exchange.
And first on the list is Victor Bout, who was arrested in 2008 in Thailand.
Steve Zissou, Bout’s New York-based lawyer, warned this month that “no American will be exchanged unless Viktor Bout is sent home.”
Although Russia has protested that Bout was ensnared by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), many US officials and analysts believe its anger is not linked to the merits of the case, but rather to Bout’s ties to Russian military counterintelligence. as Washington Post columnist Adam Taylor reports in his analysis.
“It’s clear that he had significant ties to Russian government circles,” said Lee Wolosky, a National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who led early efforts to tackle Bout’s network.
Although less famous than the KGB and its successor the FSB, Russia’s military counterintelligence agency, commonly known as the GRU, has a reputation for undertaking bolder and more dangerous actions. In recent years he has been accused of everything from hacking elections to killing dissidents.
In addition, reports suggest that Bout could have close ties to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister of Russia and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both Sechin and Bout served in the Soviet military in Africa during the 1980s.
Bout denied any such links to the GRU. He also said that he does not know Sechin.
But that silence could be the point. The arms dealer refused to cooperate with US authorities, even though he sat for more than a decade, isolated and alone, in a cell thousands of miles from his home in Moscow. This silence could be rewarded.
“He kept his cool in prison, he never exposed anything to the Americans, as far as I can tell,” said Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov.
Simon Saradzhyan of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs reported that Bout could never have run such a large smuggling operation without state protection, but that he never talked about it. “The Russian government is willing to get him back so he can stay that way,” Saradzhyan said.
Bout’s release would send a message to others who might find themselves in his shoes, said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security: “The motherland will not forget you.”
His release may also send a message to others who might find themselves in his shoes: The country will not forget them.
His return to Russia would be considered a triumph, Galeotti said. “And let’s face it, right now the Kremlin is looking for victories.”
Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of political analysis group R.Politik, said Putin wants something deeper than political gain. “We have a special word in the Russian language for people like Bout: ‘svoi.’ It means someone from “us”. He is someone who worked for the country, at least in the eyes [της κυβέρνησης]».
Bout, who has said in interviews that he was born in Tajikistan in 1967, studied languages at the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He said he was forced to study Portuguese and later sent to Angola to work as a translator for the Soviet air force.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bout, like many others who saw an opportunity to profit in the chaos, became an entrepreneur. He used a small fleet of Soviet-made Antonov An-8 planes to build an air cargo business and was apparently willing to take risks others wouldn’t, flying into war zones and failed states.
Bout is also believed to have access to something more valuable than planes: knowledge of the whereabouts of the Soviet Union’s vast stockpiles of weapons.
“He’s been moving weapons for a decade, from places like Ukraine,” said Douglas Farah, president of national security firm IBI Consultants and co-author of a book on Bout.
By 2000, Bout was one of the most notorious traffickers in the world. He was named “the leading merchant of death” in the British parliament and named in UN reports for supplying heavy weapons to a guerrilla movement in Angola as well as to Charles Taylor of Liberia while supporting a deadly civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.
Bout was arrested in Thailand (in 2008), where he was secretly recorded by the DEA arranging the purchase of 100 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 AK-47 rifles, 20,000 fragmentation grenades, 740 mortars, 350 sniper rifles, five tons of C-4 explosives and 10 million rounds of ammunition for people he thought were agents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel group.
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