Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand in 2008. Bout was later extradited to the US and convicted of conspiracy to kill Americans. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence, but he could be part of a prisoner swap that the US and Russia are trying to negotiate.
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Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand in 2008. Bout was later extradited to the US and convicted of conspiracy to kill Americans. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence, but he could be part of a prisoner swap that the US and Russia are trying to negotiate.
Image of Chumsak Kanoknan / Getty
Where most people see chaos, Viktor Bout saw opportunity.
Bout, a 55-year-old Russian, was the world’s most notorious arms dealer before a US court convicted him in 2011 and sent him to an Illinois prison. He is now the focus of a potential US-Russian prisoner swap that holds two Americans the Biden administration hopes to free.
Bout was in his mid-20s when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, leaving behind a large amount of Soviet military hardware scattered across 15 newly minted countries. Most of all of them were ill-equipped to station or track down the weapons they had just inherited. Almost everything is available for a price.
Trained in linguistics by the Soviet military, Bout began buying Soviet military transport planes and arming them. America said he sold them around the world – though mainly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
He is entrepreneurial, not ideological, selling to governments that are fighting the insurgents and to insurgents who are fighting against the government. Separating fact from fiction is often difficult when documenting Bout’s work, but multiple reports say he even sold weapons to both sides in the same conflict.
Bout has always denied selling weapons, insisting he was transporting flowers and frozen chickens to some of the most violent places in the world.
He’s always been hard to pin down, but he lives openly in Moscow, travels widely, speaks to reporters occasionally, and seems to get the attention of at least some people. He became so popular that Hollywood made a 2005 film loosely based on his life, called Deathstarring Nicholas Cage.
Despite facing international sanctions and threats of arrest, Bout managed to stay one step ahead of law enforcement until 2008, when he was caught in a stinging operation. in Thailand, organized by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Thais extradited Bout to the US two years later, where he was charged with conspiring to kill Americans. He was sentenced in a Manhattan courthouse in 2011, and is less than half of his 25-year sentence at the jail in Marion, Ill.
American basketball player Brittney Griner arrives in court outside Moscow on June 27. The US says it is conducting a potential prisoner swap that could bring Griner back to the US. She admitted in court that she had hash oil in her luggage when she arrived at the airport in Moscow. .
KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP via Getty Images
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KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP via Getty Images
American basketball player Brittney Griner arrives in court outside Moscow on June 27. The US says it is conducting a potential prisoner swap that could bring Griner back to the US. She admitted in court that she had hash oil in her luggage when she arrived at the airport in Moscow. .
KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP via Getty Images
Kremlin corner
So why would Russian leader Vladimir Putin want to bring Bout back?
After all, he made money selling weapons that were intended for use by the armies of the Soviet Union and its successor countries.
When CIA director William Burns was asked this question last week at the Aspen Security Forum, he said succinctly: “It’s a good question, because Viktor Bout is a bad guy.”
Dan Hoffman, a former CIA officer who served in Russia, says Putin’s motives should be viewed through the lens of his ongoing war with the US.
“Every chance given, Vladimir Putin wants to show that he can confront Russia’s main enemy directly,” Hoffman said. “It was a really good public relations move for him to show that he was taking care of himself.”
The US and Russia have a history of making agreements to win the return of their citizens. In April, the US released a Russian pilot convicted of or conspiring to bring drugs into the US, and Russia released him. Trevor Reeda former marine who was convicted of assaulting a Moscow police officer.
More commonly, countries have eliminated suspected spies in tit-for-tat deals.
But the current negotiations appear uneven in several respects. The United States will free a convicted arms smuggler who has operated internationally for nearly two decades.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday that two Americans, Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan was “wrongfully detained and must be allowed to return home.”
Griner, 31, is a professional basketball star who pleaded guilty to leaving hash oil in her suitcase at a Moscow airport in February. Whelan, 52, a former Marine who openly traveled to Russia for several years, was arrested in 2019 and convicted of espionage during a secret trial.
Limited options
Dan Hoffman says he supports the American efforts to achieve liberation.
“These are dirty deals, but there are two bad options,” he said. “One is to send American citizens sick, and maybe even worse, to jail. And one is, it’s basically a dirty deal. If it were me, I’d take your American citizens. I’m out.”
Blinken said he presented plans to Russia to bring the two Americans back, though he did not mention Bout by name. Blinken plans to speak with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, although it is unclear when that might be. The two have not spoken since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
A US-Russian POW swap would show that the two countries can still do business to some extent despite the dire state of relations and the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, where the US is a leading supplier of weapons. head for Ukraine.
But analysts say there is no real outlook that the overall atmosphere – which has been going from bad to worse – is likely to improve.
Greg Myre is NPR’s national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.
