Viktor Bout, the killing trader. This name epitomized two decades of worldwide arms trafficking spawned from the turmoil of the demise of the USSR, a career that inspired Hollywood before being apprehended and imprisoned by the US.
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| Brittney Griner (right) and Viktor Bout (left) |
After months of discussions, Washington decided to send over this 55-year-old guy, caught in 2008 during an American operation in Thailand, to Moscow in return for basketball player Brittney Griner, who has been held in Russia for months for a cannabis case. This iconic mustache had been the subject of years of discussions between Moscow and Washington before being sentenced to 25 years in jail in 2012.
According to a United Nations assessment, Viktor Bout was born in Dushanbe, the capital of the former Soviet country of Tajikistan, and attended the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow before joining the Air Force. According to his accusers, he knew from 1991 and the demise of the USSR to take advantage of the post-Soviet disarray to obtain a large number of munitions on military stations left to their own devices and to commanders looking for ways to profit themselves or just survive. Another brilliant move was to build his own fleet of cargo planes to transport his merchandise throughout the world.
Viktor Bout: Lord of war
The American journalist Douglas Farah, co-author of the 2008 investigative book "Merchant of Death," describes Viktor Bout as "a Soviet officer who knew how to seize the opportunity presented by three factors born of the Soviet Union's collapse: planes abandoned on runways between Moscow and Kiev (...), huge stocks of weapons guarded by soldiers who were not paid, and an explosion of demand for weapons." In 2005, the film "Lord of War," based on his life, was released, with Nicholas Cage as arms trafficker Yuri Orlov, who is being pursued by Interpol.
"The myth created by the United States about Bout is indecently primitive: a Russian bad guy was illegally selling weapons and attempting to harm America, but the good American guys put an end to it," writes Russian journalist Alexandre Gassiouk in his book published in 2021 to tell "the true story" of the "Merchant of Death."
Viktor Bout: Honest Businessman
Mr. Bout's wife, Alla, writes in the prologue of Alexandre Gassiouk's book that her husband is a "honest businessman and a wonderful patriot of his country, punished for crimes he did not commit." Viktor Bout, a former translator and radio operator in the Soviet Air Force who was suspected by some of being a member of military intelligence services, was apprehended in Thailand in 2008 by American agents. According to the prosecution, he agreed to sell an arsenal of firearms and missiles to these secret operatives acting as rebels from Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces, who stated that they intended to use the weapons to take down American helicopters assisting the Colombian army.
He was found guilty of guns trafficking in November 2011 and sentenced to 25 years in jail in April 2012 in New York. "I am not guilty, I never planned to murder anyone, I never intended to sell guns to anyone, God knows the truth," he will say before the verdict is read aloud. The Russian Foreign Ministry will then vow to do everything possible to bring him back to Russia, calling the verdict "political." Moscow has since relentlessly chastised his imprisonment, which some observers interpret as a hint that Mr. Bout was able to act with the at least implicit approval of Russian leaders.