Who is Viktor Bout, Russian arms dealer known as ‘Merchant of Death’, touted for US prisoner swap?

WASHINGTON — The way forward for two Americans detained in Russia may hinge on the discharge of a convicted Russian arms supplier, nicknamed the “Service provider of Loss of life” by his accusers, whose life story impressed a Hollywood movie.

Viktor Bout, a former Soviet navy officer, is at the moment serving a 25-year jail sentence in the USA on fees of conspiring to kill Individuals, purchase and export anti-aircraft missiles, and supply materials help to a terrorist group. Bout has maintained he’s harmless.

The Kremlin has lengthy referred to as for Bout’s launch, slamming his sentencing in 2012 as “baseless and biased.”

CNN reported Wednesday that the Biden administration supplied Bout up in a possible swap for American basketball star Brittney Griner and former US Marine Paul Whelan, based on folks briefed on the matter.

MORE: Kremlin poker-faced on US swap supply to free Griner, Whelan

On the identical day, Griner testified in Russian courtroom as a part of her ongoing trial on drug fees following her February arrest at a Moscow airport. Whelan was arrested on alleged espionage fees in 2018 and sentenced to 16-years in jail in a trial that US officers have referred to as unfair.

Their households have urged the White Home to safe their launch, together with through prisoner change if vital. Now, on the middle of that bid is Bout, a person who eluded worldwide arrest warrants and asset freezes for years.

The Russian businessman, who speaks six languages, was arrested in a sting operation in 2008 led by US drug enforcement brokers in Thailand posing because the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, recognized by the acronym FARC. He was finally extradited to the US in 2010 after a protracted courtroom continuing.

“Viktor Bout has been worldwide arms trafficking enemy primary for a few years, arming among the most violent conflicts across the globe,” stated Preet Bharara, the US legal professional in Manhattan when Bout was sentenced in New York in 2012.

“He was lastly delivered to justice in an American courtroom for agreeing to supply a staggering variety of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist group dedicated to killing Individuals.”

The trial honed in on Bout’s position in supplying weapons to FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia till 2016. The US stated the weapons have been meant to kill US residents.

However Bout’s historical past within the arms commerce prolonged a lot additional afield. He has been accused of assembling a fleet of cargo planes to visitors military-grade weapons to battle zones world wide because the Nineteen Nineties, fueling bloody conflicts from Liberia to Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Allegations of trafficking actions in Liberia prompted US authorities to freeze his American belongings in 2004 and blocked any US transactions.

Bout has repeatedly maintained that he operated legit companies and acted as a mere logistics supplier. He’s believed to be in his 50s, along with his age in dispute due to completely different passports and paperwork.

“His early days are a thriller,” Douglas Farah, a senior fellow on the Worldwide Evaluation and Technique Middle who co-authored a e book on Bout, informed CNN in 2010.

Farah informed Mom Jones journal in 2007 that based on his a number of passports, Bout was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic. He stated that Bout graduated from the Navy Institute on International Languages, a widely known feeder faculty for Russian navy intelligence.

“He was a Soviet officer, almost certainly a lieutenant, who merely noticed the alternatives introduced by three elements that got here with the collapse of the USSR and the state sponsorship that entailed: deserted plane on the runways from Moscow to Kiev, now not capable of fly due to the shortage of cash for gasoline or upkeep; enormous shops of surplus weapons that have been guarded by guards immediately receiving little or no wage; and the booming demand for these weapons from conventional Soviet purchasers and newly rising armed teams from Africa to the Philippines,” Farah informed the journal.

Bout has stated that he labored as a navy officer in Mozambique. Others have stated it was truly Angola, the place Russia had a big navy presence on the time, Farah informed CNN. He first turned recognized when the United Nations started investigating him within the early-to-mid Nineteen Nineties and the USA started to get entangled.

Bout — who reportedly has used names together with “Victor Anatoliyevich Bout,” “Victor However,” “Viktor Butt,” “Viktor Bulakin” and “Vadim Markovich Aminov” — is assumed to have been the inspiration for the arms-dealer character performed by Nicolas Cage within the 2005 film “Lord of Struggle.”

In 2002, CNN’s Jill Dougherty met with Bout in Moscow. She requested him about allegations in opposition to him — did he promote arms to the Taliban? To al Qaeda? Did he provide rebels in Africa and receives a commission in blood diamonds? — and he denied every declare.

“It is a false allegation and it is a lie,” he stated. “I’ve by no means touched diamonds in my life and I am not a diamond man and I do not need that enterprise.”

“I am not afraid,” he informed Dougherty. “I did not do something in my life I needs to be afraid of.”

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