All about Viktor Bout who exchanged for an American Griner
2022.12.08 09:22
All about Viktor Bout who exchanged for an American Griner
Budrigannews.com – After exchanging the incarcerated American basketball star Brittney Griner for him at the Abu Dhabi airport, Russia received the convicted arms dealer back from the United States on Thursday.
Prior to his 2008 arrest on multiple charges related to arms trafficking, Bout, 55, was one of the world’s most wanted men. He was dubbed “the merchant of death” and “the sanctions buster” for his ability to circumvent arms embargoes.
By selling weapons to rogue states, rebel groups, and murderous warlords in Africa, Asia, and South America for nearly two decades, Bout rose to the position of being the most notorious arms dealer in the world.
His fame was such that his life served as inspiration for the 2005 Hollywood film Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage as an arms dealer based loosely on Bout.
However, the origins of Bout remained a mystery. He was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, the capital of Soviet Tajikistan at the time, close to the border with Afghanistan, according to most biographies.
Bout reportedly attended the Dushanbe Esperanto club as a young boy and became fluent in the artificial language. He was a gifted linguist who later used his reported command of English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Persian to build his international arms empire.
Following that, Bout served as a military translator in the Soviet army, including in Angola, a nation that would later become central to his business, and claimed to have achieved the rank of lieutenant.
In the days following the Communist bloc’s collapse in 1989–91, Bout made a significant breakthrough by capitalizing on a sudden abundance of discarded Soviet-era weapons to fuel a series of fratricidal civil wars in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.
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Bout was able to acquire a squadron of approximately 60 vintage Soviet military aircraft based in the United Arab Emirates as a result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union’s vast air fleet, enabling him to distribute his goods worldwide.
A biography published in 2007 titled “Merchant of Death: Firearms, Planes, and the One Who Makes War Conceivable” by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun announced a few subtleties of Session’s cloudy exchange. Its description could not be independently verified by Reuters.
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He operated his arms trafficking empire alongside a seemingly innocuous logistics company from a base in the Gulf emirate of Sharjah, always insisting that he was a legitimate businessman with respectable clients and no case to answer.
All things being equal, Session, who originally showed up on the CIA’s radar in the midst of reports of a shadowy Russian resident exchanging arms Africa, was by the turn of the thousand years perhaps of the most needed man on the planet.
However, Bout, whose clients included militias and rebel groups from Congo to Angola and Liberia, tended to prioritize business over politics and lacked any firm ideology.
According to “Merchant of Death,” he sold guns to various Islamist Taliban insurgents and their adversaries in the pro-Western Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
According to the report, Bout provided weapons to various Congolese factions and the Philippine Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf in addition to then-Liberian President and warlord Charles Taylor, who is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence for murder, rape, and terrorism.
After an extensive sting operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008, Bout was tracked across multiple countries to a Bangkok-area luxury hotel.
Undercover U.S. agents posing as representatives of Colombia’s leftist FARC guerrillas were caught on camera agreeing to sell Bout 100 surface-to-air missiles that they would use to kill U.S. troops during a spectacular sting operation. He was apprehended by Thai authorities shortly thereafter.
He was extradited to the United States, where he was charged with conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill Americans, and money laundering after more than two years of diplomatic wrangling in which Russia strongly insisted that Bout was innocent and his case was politically charged.
Bout was tried on charges related to FARC, which he denied. In 2012, a Manhattan court found him guilty and gave him the minimum possible sentence of 25 years in prison.
The Russian government has been determined to bring him back ever since.
On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that Griner had been released as part of what Russia claimed was a trade for Bout.
She is secure. She is flying. “She is currently on her way home,” Biden tweeted.
A U.S. official said that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris called Griner from the Oval Office, and that Griner’s wife Cherelle was on the call.
Moscow claimed that Washington had refused to negotiate a Griner-for-Bout trade.
The Russian foreign ministry stated, “Nevertheless, the Russian Federation continued to actively work to rescue our compatriot.” The Russian national has been brought back to his home country.”
Some experts believe that Bout’s skills and connections in the international arms trade, in addition to the Russian state’s ongoing interest in him, strongly suggest connections to Russian intelligence.
In interviews, Session has said he gone to Moscow’s Tactical Organization of Unknown dialects, which fills in as a preparation ground for military knowledge officials.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, stated, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service, “Bout was almost certainly a GRU agent, or at least a GRU asset.”
Galeotti added, “His case has become totemic for the Russian intelligence services, who are eager to demonstrate that they don’t abandon their own people.”
Christopher Miller, a journalist who has corresponded with neo-Nazis who are also in prison with Bout at U.S. Penitentiary Marion in Illinois, says that the former arms dealer kept a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his cell and said he didn’t think Ukraine should be a country.
