Viktor Bout “The merchant of death” a convicted Russian arms dealer who has been killing Americans is considered for prisoner swap for Brittney Griner and other imprisoned Americans in Russia.
Bout, a 55-year-old Russian, was the world’s most notorious arms dealer before a U.S. court convicted him in 2011 and sent him to a prison in Illinois.
He’s now the focus of a potential prisoner swap between the U.S. and Russia, which holds two Americans the Biden administration hopes to free.
Bout was in his mid-20s when the Soviet Union fractured in 1991, leaving vast quantities of Soviet military hardware scattered across 15 newly minted countries.
Most all of them were ill-equipped to pay their troops or keep track of the weapons they’d just inherited. Almost anything was available for a price.
Trained by the Soviet military as a linguist, Bout began acquiring Soviet military transport planes and loaded them up with weapons.
The U.S. says he sold them all over the world. Various reports linked him to wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen and more.
He was entrepreneurial, not ideological, selling to governments that were fighting rebels, and to rebels who were fighting governments.
Separating fact from fiction has often been difficult when documenting Bout’s work, but many reports said he even sold arms to both sides in the same conflict.
Bout always denied he was selling weapons, claiming he was flying flowers and frozen chickens to some of the world’s most violent places.
He was always hard to pin down, but he lived openly in Moscow, traveled widely, occasionally spoke to reporters and seemed to welcome at least some of the attention.
He became so notorious that Hollywood made a 2005 movie loosely based on his life, called the Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage.
Bout was nicknamed “The Merchant of Death,” which was also the title of a biography.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.